A Whole New Box of Crayons
by Trogdor19
Summary: This story explores all the shades of illusion and reality that actors have to navigate in the process of weaving fiction into a visual reality. David Tate just landed the lead role in the movie adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey. Do you have the courage to watch as Christian Grey's kinky world takes his mind apart one piece at a time?
1. Chapter 1

_**Author's Note: I've always been fascinated by the fact that actors have to simultaneously exploit and ignore their own nature when creating a work of visual fiction. So when I was reading Fifty Shades of Grey, I was struck by how making that (borderline pornographic) novel into a wide-release movie would be really challenging for the actors starring in the film. Especially if they weren't super comfortable with BDSM. It's an interesting conflict, being able to channel the appropriate emotions for a character. How much of that is you? How much is the character? Is there a difference?**_

_**DISCLAIMER: These characters and the setting of the movie filming are purely fictional. Any resemblance to any actual person living or dead is purely coincidental. I claim no knowledge of the casting, scene selection, or overall creative aims of the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, whenever they actually make it. I don't own the characters or the scenes and dialogue from Fifty Shades of Grey. This story contains explicit sexual content and violence. **_

_**Full Summary: David Tate just landed the lead role in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, but he's not ready for the places that filming is going to take him. Do you have the courage to watch as the kinky world of Fifty Shades takes his mind apart, one piece at a time? His beguilingly innocent co-star, Julia, only drags him deeper into this imaginary world that exists a little more than it should. What will it do to his relationship with Sophie, the beautiful actress he's dating? Can he escape this darkness that's blurring the line between his life and Christian Grey's? Does he want to?**_

* * *

I'm sitting on a white iron daybed with Julia's bare ass upturned over my lap and about fifty crew members standing around watching and waiting for us to get on with it. We've met once before yesterday, and I'm trying pretty hard to pretend it's not awkward. Lucy, the director, grabs my hand and presses it between Julia's sharp shoulder blades, talking a mile a minute. A girl from Makeup squirms in between us to add a touch of powder to Julia's butt cheeks.

To be honest, when we did the auditions for this movie, I'd pictured filming being a little more fun.

* * *

**_Two Months Ago_**

* * *

I love my job.

Today, I'm getting paid to have some of the hottest women in Hollywood on their knees in front of me. If things go well, I'm _supposed _to kiss them, so the casting director can decide if it looks like we are having fun. Score.

This would be a high point in the life of most dudes, and I'm not unaware of that. To be honest though, it's not that different from my normal job on a teen drama series. Or even my actual life considering that I'm dating a gorgeous former dancer whose list of acting awards is even longer than her lovely legs. Ah, Sophie.

I wait for the next actress to come in, hiding my twinge of regret. Sophie would have been dead perfect for this role if anybody was still capable of seeing us as anything but Alex and Emily from _Queen of Hearts_. Filming would have been a lot more fun, too.

When people started tossing around both of our names for the starring roles in the movie version of the bondage-themed-romance _Fifty Shades of Grey, _Sophie suggested we read the book together to see if either of us should be seriously pursuing the project. Sophie barely got through the second chapter before she dropped her copy, looked me in the eye and said, "You _have_ to do this."

I was still surprised a couple weeks ago when they told me the job was mine for the taking. BDSM is not exactly my bag, but this is going to be a big, big movie. Bigger than any feature film I've ever done by far. The cherry on top of my sundae? Helping the casting director find me a co-star with the appropriate chemistry.

For the audition, we're doing the scene where the characters first meet. It starts with virginal college student Ana coming into rich, dominant CEO Christian's office and tripping and falling to the floor. He lifts her back to her feet and shakes her hand, and then they move to the couch for a subtext-laden interview crackling with sexual tension. So far this morning, five girls have tripped and fallen at my feet.

Emma Watson. She's pretty, and older than I expected. We've got a good vibe, but please God and casting directors everywhere, do not make me have to go all whips and chains on _Hermione._

Alexis Bledel. A Gilmore Girl? Really? Still, we've got a delicate spark between us. As the audition unfolds, I get my first real glimpse of how powerful the dominant/submissive dynamic is going to be with me playing opposite one of these sweetly vulnerable girls. Before I know it, Alexis has beguiled me into falling a little too deeply into her lovely eyes. That's ruined at the end of the take when she cuts the chemistry off with the abruptness of a guillotine, going back to brusquely professional in less than a blink. Ah, one of_ those_ girls. It could work, but do I want it to?

Amanda Seyfried. We have the romantic tension of an old fruitcake and a vacuum cleaner. I think this is mostly due to the fact that in real life, her dramatic eyes are just way too fucking big. She looks like a blonde alien-human cross. She's sent on her way before we even make it to the kiss.

Another blonde. I didn't catch her name, but she's as delicate and ethereal as a fairy. A fourteen-year-old fairy. I'm playing a 27-year-old CEO going after a college grad, but the "innocent" requirement in Ana's character description appears to be bringing out the all dewy-skinned, wide-eyed types. I feel like a cradle robber.

Granted, Sophie's quite a bit younger than me, but that girl has the mind of a southern society matron crossed with an army general. If she wasn't cheerleader cute and blessed with a wickedly playful sense of humor, she'd be a little scary.

Mila Kunis. The air between us is so hot that the director asks for two full run-throughs, and we get a trial kiss. She's cracking me up with jokes in between every take and I don't know if she'd be right for Ana, but she'd definitely be fun to work with. Somebody's going to have to break the tension between all those bondage scenes, and I'm already missing Josh, my go-to comic relief in the cast of my regular show. Queen of Hearts is in the off-season, which is why I'm free for this movie. Honestly, though, I would have begged them to write me into a coma for a couple episodes for a career opportunity like this one.

Mila's still got the big-eye thing, though. Why everybody wants to see Bambi get a spanking, I'm not quite sure.

I grab a water break, and then Julia Grant is up. She plays an empress on a popular fantasy series that I've watched a few times. It's on HBO, so she's no stranger to nude scenes. She has shiny brown hair like Sophie's, and wide sea-green eyes that can do knowing, naive and enraged with equal facility.

Julia trips and goes down so hard on her entrance that I wince, forgetting that she meant to do that. I take my cue and gently draw her back to her feet. She's a tiny little thing. My hand goes nearly all the way around her upper arm and once she's on her feet, her head only reaches my collarbone.

She slowly raises her face to mine, looking shaken. The air between our bodies is fairly shimmering with attraction. I want her and I've barely even taken a full look at her yet. But her bones are so small and breakable that I perversely want to wrap her in a hug as much as I want to undress her.

As our eyes connect, hers widen slightly and it is obvious that she's just pictured me naked. More than that, she knows that I know she just pictured me naked and is mortified by it.

Unbidden, Christian Grey's smile spreads across my face. Intrigued and a little bit wicked, because I've read the script and oh, the things I'm going to do to this woman. With her, his smile is mine. This audition is over.

* * *

_**Two Months Later**_

* * *

This is only the second day of shooting, but we're already doing the first punishment spanking scene. The director, Lucy insists on showing me exactly how to hold Julia down.

"Firmly, like this, and spread your fingers, so your hand looks bigger and her back more vulnerable. The line between wide release and soft core is all about camera angles, so we're not going to see her actual butt. The end product will probably be cuts of both your reaction shots, your hand on her back and the side curve of her bottom. I'd like to do a few shots with your hand fisted in her hair, pulling her head back just slightly. Nothing too dramatic. This is the first dominant scene and we don't want to disappoint, but we don't want to overplay our hand."

I'm nodding obediently but is she seriously ever going to shut up? I'm so glad I'm not the one whose ass is hanging out while we discuss blocking right over the top of it. For about the hundredth time, I resist the urge to pull the quilt over Julia in between takes. I've done dozens of these cable-friendly sex scenes. I'm not a prude, for God's sake.

"Are we doing the leg thing?" I manage to interject.

"You know what? Do the whole run through, and then we'll do a separate one with that. Just go with your gut. So if you want to clamp her legs between yours at first, or if you want to use that halfway through to up the ante-," Lucy gestures inarticulately. "Whatever feels good."

Julia flips over in my lap and speaks up in her naturally soft British accent. "What about the rubbing? I was re-reading this scene in the book this morning, and he's sort of stroking her in between each strike and it is very harsh but very tender. I get the idea that one feeds the other. Like the harder he strikes her, the gentler it makes him in between."

"Allows him to be," I say without meaning to. I've read the book, too. "The more severe he is the more it gives him permission to be gentle."

Julia smiles beautifully at me. "Exactly."

She's wearing a flesh-colored thong that looks like nothing and she doesn't bother to pull her yoga pants up while we talk, since we'll probably pick back up halfway through the scene.

Lucy is nodding frantically. I think she is way too hot for this story, personally. I don't know if this shoot is going to be long enough to get her over her micro-managing tendencies. Julia and I were bitching over beers about it last night. Both of us work on long-running shows and we've gotten used to having the trust of the production staff. After that, Lucy's antics are all the more irritating.

"Okay, so the way you want to play that is to-," Lucy starts, as if she's ever acted a day in her goddamn life.

"Stroke up her back a little bit so the camera can catch it," I interrupt.

"Watch the face shots," Julia adds. "He can display most of that concept with just his eyes."

My eyebrows twitch as I glance down at her, not sure how to take this unexpected endorsement. She's right, of course. After playing lovesick bad-boy Alex Harper for three years, I've perfected the switch between fierce and tender. It's a little flare of the eyes and then relaxing the small muscles around them, moving your visual focus from one spot to a little bigger area.

I wink at Julia. I'm enjoying working with her every bit as much as I thought I would. She's a great mix of professional, passionate and fun when it comes to acting. She really loves what she does.

"David, like I said before, we'll dub in the sound of your hand smacking flesh, so keep it gentle. But we need your muscles flexing and the force of the swings to look real, okay?"

I will not roll my eyes.

Unfortunately, I have to hold back a laugh at that thought because I am supposedly giving Julia this spanking because her character rolled her eyes (well-deservedly) at mine.

I nod with great solemnity. Lucy's a good director. She's going to come up with a great film. If I don't kill her first.

Lucy gestures for us to start from the top, so Julia pulls her pants back on. I jerk Julia down over my lap, my fingers overlapping around her tiny wrist. I'm going to look like a caveman onscreen next to her.

I milk the moment when I slowly lower her pants, but I know the camera's going to be all over Julia's wide eyes and erratic breathing. This time, I hold her down hard, crushing her small breasts into my thigh and the mattress. My hand is biting into the flesh of her back and the next fake-spank lands a little too hard. My eyes flare and I bite back an apology, soothing her skin instead.

I can't get over how little she is. I really can control her whole body with one hand.

Lucy signals me to move my hand and I fist it brutally into Julia's silky hair, pulling her head back just enough for the camera to get a look at the fear in her eyes, her lips shiny and full as she pants out her anticipation of the next blow.

And motherfuck, I'm hard. There's no way Julia's going to miss it, because per Lucy's directions I'm shoving her into my lap. So I just go with it. I can die a thousand deaths of professional embarrassment later, but really, did anybody think I'd make it through this whole two months of filming without popping wood? Sophie's been teasing me about the possibility since I got the part.

I bring my hand down, and it lands a little too hard again. The next spank looks phony because it's too gentle. Julia strains against my hand. I automatically resist, holding her in place by her hair. I like the feel of pulling her head back, controlling where she looks. I try to concentrate on the spanking, on making it look real.

It sucks. I'm either unconvincing, or too harsh. Lucy's back and she's babbling at me. I struggle to focus.

The next excruciatingly long sequence has me pinning Julia's legs between mine. I don't think it is going to show as well on camera. Still, the more immobile I force her to be, the more she wriggles against me, gasping out little cries of pain that make it hard to remember that I'm not really punishing her. I break a sweat and makeup has to run over and powder my forehead between takes. Thank goodness Julia doesn't move so my incredibly long-lived erection is still just my business. And, unfortunately, hers.

The makeup crew gets out of my face about two seconds before Lucy's in it again, with a thin pink cushion that she straps around Julia's poor ass. Apparently my spanks weren't convincingly powerful, so now I'm going to chastise the heck out of this cushion.

"Go to town, David," Julia cranes her head around to wink at me.

"You can put me over your knee later, I promise," I tell her sympathetically.

This cannot be the most fun she's ever had on a job, especially with the crowded set. I know if it was me, I'd be holding back a fart the whole time.

She turns back over, we reset, and I land the first blow. The slap against the vinyl-covered cushion is surprisingly loud in the silence of the sound stage.

Lucy gestures excitedly and I put some force into the next one. It jolts Julia against my leg and I wince before I can stop myself. Lucy cuts because I just ruined the fucking take with an amateur's mistake. Her face is stiff and I think she might be holding back an eye roll now.

I've got to channel my character better than this. I can't just be whacking away. My face drops into Christian's mask. Impeccably controlled, with his excitement leaking out only in his eyes. This time when Julia lurches from my blow, a shock of exhilaration goes through me.

She's got a great reaction, her face scrunching attractively, her teeth gritted against the pain. It makes me want to give it to her harder. So I do. Soon, her fists are clenching in the sheets and she's writhing a little, flinching but then pushing back for my hand if I go too long between strikes. Her hip feels good against my swollen flesh. When I finally wring a cry out of her, it goes to my head like strong whiskey before I remember that she's faking it.

The take is perfect, and I know it. Lucy knows it too, and she lets it go on for quite a while. I land one more cruel spank as she calls a wrap, and feel a twinge of embarrassment. Should I have been able to stop before that last one?

My erection is twisted painfully against my waistband. Lucy's calling for a break and there is no way I'm getting to my dressing room without the family-sized tent that is my pants advertising itself to everyone here.

I free the cushion from Julia and give her a hand up. On her way to her feet, she makes a quick movement with the back of her wrist that jogs my junk into a more comfortable position. My eyes widen. It's a pretty personal thing to do, but done with such professional nonchalance. And kindness.

Plus, now I can actually stand up without making it clear that I am the filthiest kind of method actor.

"Are you okay?" I ask her.

She grins, shimmying back into her pants. "That last take was spot-on. I think that's going to be the best material."

I'm happy to leave it at that and escape to my dressing room.

I'm surprised at how easy it was to slip into the sensual ruthlessness that is Christian Grey. He wants to dominate this girl, and as soon as he starts, his demons are driving him harder, faster, not letting him subside. I just didn't expect that with the first blow to that silly cushion that those demons would reveal themselves so clearly to me. I'm all for diving into a character, but I like to feel like I'm the one controlling the jump.

I need to get rid of this erection, and I do it efficiently, without much enjoyment. A mental image of Sophie over my lap while I hold her down makes me catch my breath and then I shove it away, replacing it with a more comfortable blowjob fantasy.

When I'm done, I wash my hands and sigh. We have half an hour for a break and I'm still feeling twitchy and restless.

I pick up a set of cufflinks and rattle them in my hand, then set them back down. I check my phone and think of calling Sophie before I remember that she is filming all day. She said last night that she was in practically every scene on the list today. She has my sympathy. _Fifty_ _Shades of Grey_ is Ana and Christian-centric. There's not much I get to sit out for this movie, which makes for a hellish schedule. The break I'm currently wasting will be hard to come by in a couple weeks.

I hit the speed dial for Josh instead, who plays my brother on _Queen of Hearts_. We're rivals because we are both in love with Sophie's character, but the writers have had us addressing each other as 'brother' so often that it's been a running joke with us. During our first season, we'd insert it into every other word in between takes and crack ourselves up.

Josh is filming a feature film in the off-season too, but he picks up on the first ring.

"What's up, bro? You got a break?"

"Sure. We had to send the production assistant out for more Kleenex," Josh says darkly.

"I told you not to do an indie flick."

"I know, but wide release, indie, HBO or cable, nobody wants to cast me as anything but a tearjerker. Is it because I'm Jewish? Because seriously, if I make another person cry I'm gonna blow my fucking brains out."

I laugh and sit down, kicking my feet up onto my dressing table. "Tell me about it. I spent all morning beating a girl who looks young enough to sleep with a teddy bear."

"Oh, your sad life where you get to make soft-core porn and probably get a goddamn Oscar for it," Josh snipes without heat. "I'll tell production to messenger over some of our abundant Kleenex."

"You could call Sophie for a bitch session," I offer. "She's doing a comedy, and it's wringing her dry. She says it is way harder to _try_ to be funny than to just be funny naturally. You ought to do a comedy. You're the only one around here with a sense of humor."

"I'd love to, but my agent insists I'm too deadpan. He says I need to learn to look like I'm making a joke, or no one will ever get it."

"You could do British. They like dry."

"They like accented."

"Learn it. What are you, an actor or a Walmart greeter? Julia's got an accent and she turns it on and off like a switch. It's freaky."

"How's working with her, by the way?"

"Hot as fuck," I say without embellishment. "She's a real professional, even though her resume's pretty short. I see why they snatched her up for that huge fantasy series. Everybody called it a long shot, but it wasn't. That girl was born to act."

"So are you having the time of your life, getting all kinked up?"

I shift uncomfortably. "It's new. I wanted something new."

Josh bursts out laughing.

I frown. "What?"

"You can't hit her, can you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You're a good southern boy, Dave. You've never hit a woman in your life. I was going to say something when you got the role, but I figured you had to have thought about it and sorted your shit out already."

"It's not _real_, Josh," I say scornfully. "Besides, I'm not playing an abusive husband, I'm playing a Dom."

"Best paid Dom in the business."

"Hey, you know how much I like to play a new villain. If it pays the bills, so much the better. There's no way this thing isn't going trilogy," I remind him, changing the subject.

"Yeah, I still think it's a gamble whether it'll be big in the box office, though. Not everybody wants to watch that kind of stuff sitting next to their neighbors. Netflix'll buy ten million DVD's but that might not give you the return you need to get investors for a trilogy."

"We're promoting how 'tastefully' we've done it," I say, adding air quotes. "I think Julia's getting the bulk of the interviews for that one, because she can look so earnest when she says it will be emotionally satisfying and sensual and not really that dirty."

"True. No matter what you say, they make it look dirty." Josh laughs. "Just wait until you do the interview circuit to promote this. I'm going to laugh myself stupid when Oprah begs to be taken over your knee."

I roll my eyes. "My lawyer and publicist can earn a buck or two writing me appearance agreements with some hard limits. Is Katie hanging with you down there?"

"Yeah, we're location shooting for another week and then we'll all be in L.A. together. If you can negotiate five minutes off we'll all go out for drinks. Katie doesn't have any projects right now, so she's playing real person for a month or so," Josh pauses. "It's been really nice, actually."

"Text me when you get here, maybe we can wrangle some joint gym time so I don't lose quite so many brain cells when I'm pumping my requisite amount of iron. All that bitching from my dad about how I shouldn't have to make a living from the sweat of my brow and I still get paid to lift heavy things. Only now I have to do it in my nonexistent free time."

Josh barks a laugh. "Even if they didn't pay you to work out, you can't keep still long enough to go white collar. It'd be nice if useful muscle was the same as pretty muscle, though, wouldn't it?"

A production assistant knocks hesitantly on the door. I swear, they teach them that self-conscious little knock in film school. It never fails to piss me off, which means that by the afternoon of Day 2 of filming, I have memorized the names, hometowns and significant other's names of every production assistant, cross referenced with their exact knocking style. My first acting coach told me that any exercise of memorization is useful to an actor, so I consider it in my job description.

"How long do I have, Nicole?"

"Four minutes, Mr. Tate."

"I'll be right there. Please stop making me feel old, I'm supposed to be 27 for this one, right?" I'm rewarded by her self-conscious giggle through the door.

"Sorry David. Three and a half minutes."

I grin. I like an efficient production assistant. You can train the timid out of them, but you can't train the competent into them.

"They ringing you back in?" Josh asks.

"Sure enough. Give the good doctor a kiss from me. Make it good, too." Josh's wife got a Ph.D. in geology before she came to work acting on our show. She's one of my favorite cast members, because she takes no shit from anyone at any time.

"How many episodes are we going to get into the next season before the writers give you an affair with her?" Josh asks, pained. Since Josh's wife started working on the show, things have gotten pretty incestuous. And my character gets around.

"I'm going for five. Maybe six. Depends on how cruel the writers make Sophie this season." I stand up and check myself in the mirror.

"Maybe four then."

I laugh. "Yeah, maybe four. Call the Dave Tate hotline if those Sundance Film Festival freaks get you feeling like shopping for razor blades."

"Will do."

I'm about to hang up when Josh's voice stops me.

"Brother?"

I grunt in response and shift my weight nervously.

"Are you okay?"

I fucking _knew_ he was going to ask that.

"Living the dream, little bro," I say lightly. "Catch you later."

I hang up and head for the door, but when I realize my hand is on the knob and I'm not moving, something rolls queasily in my stomach.

I open the door and stride into the hallway. Have to watch this new Craft Services department. Their eggs aren't the freshest, that's all.

_**Author's Note: Please leave me a review and let me know what you think of where this is going. This is a brand new kind of story for me, so I'd really love to hear what you think is or is not working!**_


	2. Chapter 2

Today's filming went good. Some build-up scenes and the vanilla sex deflowering scene, which my dick managed with some goddamn professionalism for a change despite about six hours of rolling around mostly naked with Julia. So there's no reason for me to be playing with the stereo the whole ride home, restlessly flipping stations in my rental car.

An inappropriate erection is the masturbation of the film world. Pretty much everybody gets them, nobody talks about it. Still, I schedule enough alone time in my dressing room these days that my hand is going to be asking for a contract defining the limits of our relationship soon. Which is fine, suffering for my art and all. Still, the last time Sophie got off work early and reached for me I had to send her over the edge alone and that's more suffering than I need to do for any art.

We haven't officially moved in together, but since we're both filming in L.A. for a couple months, we got a two bedroom rental house with a yard for my dog, Jackson. Otherwise, Sophie rationalized, we wouldn't see each other at all and unconscious time together is better than nothing.

Sophie's a brilliantly independent career woman, which means she will never admit she hates sleeping alone. Not if we're together for the next seventy years, she'll never admit it.

We got the two bedroom so that when one of us came home late, the other one could sleep undisturbed. I knew it was bullshit, but I played along. Besides, it's more fun to come home and crawl into the guest bed and count the minutes until Sophie's scratchy sleep voice calls my name. Sometimes, she's too worn out to speak, but even then she'll shuffle over and collapse into the guest bed with me.

Once, when _Queen of Hearts_ was running consecutive night and day shoots with the logic of a sadistic schizophrenic, I made it in the door only to fall asleep on the hardwood of Sophie's foyer. We weren't "living together" then either. But I woke up in the morning with a hell of a sore back and an ex-ballerina curled on my chest like a stray kitten.

I'll probably never admit I hate sleeping without her, too. With any luck, I won't ever have to.

It is two hours past her bedtime, if she wants anything like eight hours before her morning run and four a.m. makeup and hair deadline. But I hear the shower running when I open the front door and it spreads a smile across my face again.

I barely stop to scratch Jackson's ears before I leave a trail of clothes between the front door and the shower.

Sophie's scrubbing her hair when I pull back the shower curtain and she shrieks and flinches. I laugh in satisfaction and catch her before she can slip on the wet tile. Her eyes are squinched shut against the soap that is now in all the wrong places.

Sophie curses me creatively as I guide her head under the water, rinsing her face and then rubbing her scalp as I rinse the shampoo out for her.

Her curses dwindle and cease. She relaxes against me, her forehead falling into my shoulder. When the shampoo is gone, I move my fingers down a bit, working the knots out of her neck where it always gets stiff from the weight of her hair. My massage therapist sister taught me a trick or two when she was still in school. I wonder if she would have done it if she knew how often it had gotten me laid.

I rest my cheek against the top of Sophie's head, feeling uncharacteristically protective. Most of the characters I play are all about guarding their women, but actors dating actresses don't get that luxury.

I'm caught by memories of Julia's nakedness today. All those hours in each other's arms wearing absurd scraps of flesh-colored thongs with dozens of strangers recording it so that thousands of strangers can be titillated by the final cut of our exertions.

My teeth grind against the thought of Sophie exposed like that, to crew members scratching their balls while they ogle her tits. To all the people who will get off to the DVD version. I'm glad as fuck that I took the role of Christian Grey, if only because it made her refuse the call to audition for Anastasia Steele.

Julia's doing a beautiful job. I know the final cut with her in it _will _actually be tasteful. _Will _be sensual and not dirty. Perversely, I'm still glad it's not Sophie.

Sophie doesn't do full frontal. I do so many sex scenes on the show that I always figured I'd be fine with it if she wanted to do a movie with nudity someday. Turns out I was wrong.

I leave her head propped into the curve of my neck and move both my hands to knead the sleek muscles of her back. She's exhausted, and so am I. I'll be lucky if my reflexes are still up to the task of catching her if she falls asleep on her feet.

I can still hear the sound of my hand slapping that vinyl cushion shielding Julia's ass from me, days ago. If anyone ever straps a vinyl cushion to Sophie's bare behind, I will rip their fucking eyeballs out.

_**Author's Note: Hope you are enjoying this new story- please leave a review and let me know what you think!**_


	3. Chapter 3

_DISCLAIMER: These characters and the setting of the movie filming is purely fictional. Any resemblance to any actual person living or dead is purely coincidental. I claim no knowledge of the casting, scene selection, or overall creative aims of the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, whenever they actually make it. I don't own the characters or the scenes and dialogue from Fifty Shades of Grey. This story contains explicit sexual content and violence._

* * *

I'm standing offstage, awaiting my cue. Julia's in the set for Christian's kitchen, dressed only in a man's button-front shirt that desperately needs one more button done up. I love a girl wearing just my shirt, but this isn't my shirt. This is a Franken-shirt from Wardrobe. The chest and armpits have been taken in so that her breasts are clearly but casually accented.

On a hanger, it looks like hell. On Julia, who is wearing pigtails and a bit of a mussed, well-fucked look, it reminds me of why the Catholic schoolgirl uniform is a staple in the porno industry.

She's rocking out alone in the kitchen, dancing and singing into a spatula. Her body moves with a fascinating mixture of childlike abandon and pure, unabashed sex. I don't think there's a person on the set who can take their eyes off of her.

Lucy calls a cut, a touch of impatience in her voice.

"Julia, you're doing great, but your singing is a little stiff. You're supposed to think you're alone and you're totally letting yourself go in the moment."

Julia drops the dancing and the American accent in a second. "And if this song wasn't total bollocks, Lucy, I'd be sure to do that!"

My shout of laughter almost drowns out her next words. "I mean, tell me please, what kind of dunderheaded _twat_ would want to leap about a kitchen to music like this? What the hell is it called, anyway?"

"Taylor Swift," one of the female lighting techs supplies with a grin.

"Swift kick in the arse, more like," Julia complains.

"Somebody please tell me they got that for the DVD bloopers," I gasp.

Lucy doesn't look like she's finding it as funny as I am.

"It's female empowerment music," Lucy argues.

"The only thing it is empowering is-."

I cut her off before she gets Lucy upset. "Hey, Luce, do we have any kind of kickback agreement for using that song?"

"No," she admits, somewhat sullenly.

"Then there's no harm in changing it, is there? What would you prefer, Julia?"

She cocks her head at me, pigtails swinging. "Slipknot?"

"Marry me?" I counter, laughing.

She sniffs. "Nah. I plan to marry for money."

I make a face at her and she crinkles her nose at me playfully before turning back to Lucy. "No, how about…oh hell. It has to be girly, doesn't it?"

Lucy nods firmly.

Julia and Lucy fall into arguing about the music. I grab a folding chair and pull out my phone, texting Sophie.

**David: How's your day going? Right now we're filming Woman Movie Scene #1. Wanna take a guess?**

She must be on break or waiting for her cue, too, because her response pops up after only a few seconds.

**Sophie: Girl's night in, with chardonnay. Or dancing in kitchen, singing into wooden spoon. Am I close?**

**David: Your psychic powers are only eclipsed by your beauty.**

**Sophie: Screenwriter's creative powers are only eclipsed by a dime. **

**Sophie: Positioned sideways.**

**Sophie: Do you know how many times a fart joke involving a small dog is funny?**

**David: Negative 4?**

**Sophie: Your mathematical powers are only eclipsed by your prowess in bed. **

I realize I'm grinning at my phone like a teenybopper. I put it away before somebody catches me acting like a sap. Music comes through the speakers and I stand up to watch. The song sounds pretty similar to my ears, but Julia must like it better, because her singing is better and her dancing…

I shift uncomfortably and realize I forgot to do preventative maintenance in my dressing room this morning. There are no sex scenes on the list for today, but apparently even that isn't enough to keep me out of trouble.

And that's my cue. I make a swift movement that will contain my dick in my waistband and step on set, my body arranging itself into the restrained posture of a man accustomed to wearing suits. I tilt my head at Julia, a bemused smile playing around the edges of my lips.

She stops dead, blushing. Her eyes drop to my lips and then she's a whole new kind of embarrassed, a girl seeing a boy after the first time they've been intimate. I move toward her, taking my time to let the camera catch her reaction as I get closer.

By the time I reach her, I can see the pulse hammering in the hollow of her throat and she swallows once, quickly. Her eyes are even dilated, as if she's aroused. How does she _do_ that? Maybe Alexis would have been easier to work with, with her switch that goes 'off' at the end of the scene. Julia's so good, you can't tell which are her feelings and which are Ana's.

I tug one of the pigtails. "You're very energetic this morning, Miss Steele," I say, infusing my dominant tone with just a hint of amusement.

She should have been wearing this shirt for the spanking scene. It would be too easy to turn her over my knee, her soft buttocks just inches away and barely protected by loose white fabric. My mind knows she's wearing flesh-colored gym shorts, but my penis thinks she is the only thing under that shirt and those buttons are looking very precarious.

God, why couldn't Sophie have gotten this part? We could have been making much, much better use of my dressing room time. Plus, she'd look brain-erasingly beautiful in the Franken-shirt.

There is a little catch in Julia's breathing, and she turns her eyes away nervously. "I slept well."

Christian would be thinking about spanking her right now, too. I should probably just go with it.

Julia moves away toward the pancake batter she's supposed to be working on. I move closer until I can feel the heat of her back against my chest, angling myself to make the difference in our sizes look the most dramatic. I think I see a shiver run through her shoulders but I can't be sure. I'm in just the right place to push her down over the counter and take her from behind. The camera knows it. She knows it.

I don't move.

_Author's Note: Please leave me a review and let me know what you think about this story, good/bad/ugly and if you find any parts confusing or over the line. It is a very different kind of story, for me and for what is normally on this site, so I am very much wishing I had more feedback. Thanks for reading!_


	4. Chapter 4

_DISCLAIMER: These characters and the setting of the movie filming is purely fictional. Any resemblance to any actual person living or dead is purely coincidental. I claim no knowledge of the casting, scene selection, or overall creative aims of the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, whenever they actually make it. I don't own the characters or the scenes and dialogue from Fifty Shades of Grey. This story contains explicit sexual content and violence._

* * *

"Why do you want to hurt me?" Julia whispers, her sea-colored eyes huge, desperate with love and disappointment and the first hints of fear.

Lucy cut on my reaction three times already. I need to get my head back in the game.

My body is painful with tension. I narrow my eyes at Julia.

Ana. She's Ana now.

"I need it," I say roughly, the words pulled out of me. I close my eyes, happy to hide my shame. "I can't tell you why."

"Can't or won't?"

"If I tell you-," I open my eyes and this is it. This is the darkest fear of every man down on one knee with a ring box in his hand.

"If I tell you the truth about me, you'll never want to see me again."

She softens visibly, but she's still torn. Fear grows and mixes with resolve. She squares her shoulders, but somehow seems smaller.

"If you can't tell me, then show me."

"What do you mean?"

"If you need it, if you have to have it, then show me how bad it will be."

"What?"

"Punish me," she challenges, but she's far from sure. She moistens her lips. "I'm scared. I want to know what the worst is going to be. I want to know now, before we go any further."

I stare at her, horror and disbelief warring with helpless desire. Christian is afraid it will be too much for Ana. I'm afraid it'll be too much for me.

I've been dreading this scene since we did the first take of the punishment spanking. This is the scene where I take a belt to her bare ass. No holds barred, nothing sensual about it. This is cruelty. If Julia were a few years younger, someone would arrest me for doing this.

I don't know what I'm going to do if I like it.

She's staring up at me, her full lips quivering, a wisp of hair teasing her delicate cheekbone. The thought of raising a hand to her makes me feel sick all over. I'm scared as fuck it's going to turn me on.

I grab her by the wrist and jerk her along behind me as she struggles to keep up.

I throw open the door to the Red Room of Pain and point to a padded bench. "Kneel down on that."

She stumbles on her way over to it, looking very young and very, very frightened. Her shiny dark hair falls in front of her face and it looks like Sophie's.

A flash of hot anger mixed with nausea floods through me.

I tear the robe off of her with so much force that it pulls her arms out from under her and she falls forward onto the bench. I throw the robe down, my face a snarl of vicious passion, and wrench her panties down, leaving behind only that inadequate, flesh colored thong.

Lucy cuts and rushes forward. She starts to talk but I wave her off. Nicole hurries in and straps that pink vinyl cushion onto Julia, the only protection she is allowed against me. I want to keep going, want to get this the fuck over with but I make myself ask, "Are you okay?"

She turns her head just a little and I have no idea who I'm looking at. "Make it hurt," she hisses, her eyes dark.

Because she wants it, or because she knows I need the encouragement?

Lucy calls the scene and the cameras are rolling again. I stalk away and open a drawer, taking out a wide belt of thick but supple leather and winding it around my fist. The leather smells good. I want to hit something.

Julia's crouched, visibly trembling on the bench. Her hair curtains her face and I yank it away. She gives a little involuntary squeak. This isn't in the script, but it leaves her face exposed at a better angle for the cameras.

"I want you to count them," I say, my voice echoing with command.

I plant my feet wide and wrap the belt one more time around my hand. I think everyone on the sound stage is holding their breath. I lift my chin for one second, giving everyone a good look at the fascinated trepidation burning behind my eyes. Christian knows this will chase Ana away, but he can't help himself. It's what he is. It's what he knows.

He raises the belt. I bring it down.

The crack of the belt hitting the cushion slaps the silence of the set. Julia jolts forward with a choking gasp.

"One," she manages, her voice shaky and shrill.

I bring the belt high into the air, letting the malicious leather dangle from my fist.

I whip it toward her. The impact knocks her off balance and her hands scramble against the padded bench to stay upright.

"Two," she begs, and you can hear her disbelief and horror. She's still not sure that Christian will go through with it, will take it past this.

My whole body flashes hot then cold. Nausea clenches in my throat and sweat breaks out on my brow. I can't let them cut to powder me again or I'll never be able to go through with it. At least I didn't get an erection. Does that make this better or worse?

I hit her again.

She drops to her elbows, a cry ripping unevenly from her throat and her face drops into her hands, tears wetting her eyelashes. I lock my knees so I won't drop to the floor and beg her to forgive me.

It's not real. She has a cushion, so she can't really feel the belt, and her pain is all feigned. My mind knows this but my eyes aren't sure.

In the book, it's four strokes. Here, I think I'm supposed to go until Lucy gets enough material. I can't do another take. I can't do another fucking take.

Some part of my brain is clicking away with icy efficiency, calculating how to make this a world-class scene that can never, will never, be topped.

I grab Julia's hair with my free hand, careful that her hair doesn't obscure her face. My fist restrains her head as I raise the belt again.

I position my body just right so that Camera Three will be able to use me to cover her ass, and they can get a wide shot that will show the brutality of this moment.

The belt hangs for a long, pregnant moment and as if we'd planned this, Julia tenses. When no blow falls, her breath breaks on a whimper that shakes her narrow shoulders. I nail her as hard as I can make myself and only my hand in her hair holds her up.

When I let go, she collapses onto the bench, her face to the side so that everyone can see her lips, swollen where she bit them to hold back the pain, tears streaking her perfect skin. She's wracked with silent sobs.

I stand over her, wide legged and powerful. Lucy doesn't call the cut, but I don't care. I drop the belt on the floor, the buckle clunking against the hardwood with the finality of a bolt slamming home.

* * *

_Author's Note: I said I wouldn't say anything, but I can't stand it! He's NOT actually hurting her. She's acting. The reason it seems so real is that it is in David's POV, and he's lost between the reality and the fantasy of this movie right now. It'd be better writing if I just let you wonder, but neither David nor I is immune to the potential brutality of this scene. Please drop me a comment and let me know if you like the story, if you think it is over the line, what is working for you and what isn't. I'm seeing the read counts, but I have no idea if people hate it or are indifferent to it, or are totally addicted. Please help me out here!_


	5. Chapter 5

_DISCLAIMER: These characters and the setting of the movie filming is purely fictional. Any resemblance to any actual person living or dead is purely coincidental. I claim no knowledge of the casting, scene selection, or overall creative aims of the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, whenever they actually make it. I don't own the characters or the scenes and dialogue from Fifty Shades of Grey. This story contains explicit sexual content and violence._

* * *

They film me as I stand too close to Julia, watching her as she reads the pages of legal agreements defining the sexual relationship of our characters.

It is a quiet scene.

It will be cut together with images from large-print versions of the documents, zooming in on passages made interesting by words referencing exotic sex toys. On the repetitive use of the word Dominant and Submissive, in letters plain enough to pass for Times New Roman. They aren't. They were hand-chosen by a production team that probably burned through several grand of billable hours to find a font that was just the right amount of authoritarian and professional.

It's the typeface psych eval of my character. I wonder if she likes it. I wonder if I mean Ana or Julia.

Julia might as well be reading her movie contract, the one she signed allowing me to strip her and beat her in front of strangers. She's already signed but I feel like she hasn't, that I'm still begging for her to tell me it is okay to do that to her. When it so obviously isn't.

I watch, quietly absorbed in the play of emotions across her face. Shock, confusion, intrigue, arousal. Disappointment that she cares about a man who could want these things, could want to cause her pain.

Her eyes flicker to mine once, with compassion so intimate that I glance away automatically before I realize that it is the right reaction. For Christian, not for me.

* * *

_Author's Note: Please leave a review. I am as lost about what my readers are thinking as David is lost about what Julia is really thinking. _


	6. Chapter 6

The over-laden table outside Craft Services is staring back at me.

_Protein. Lean meat and vegetables._ My personal trainers's voice is a monotone in the back of my head, and I'm trying to re-connect my tongue and my stomach but all I can see is the abused toddler version of Christian Grey, starved. The dogs in Cambodia, all ribs and matted fur.

We've been doing scenes about Christian Grey's messed up childhood all morning. I'm not in most of them because they are flashback scenes with the child version of me, but it is still pretty depressing. I shove a dry chicken breast into my mouth and try to cheer myself with memories of Hugh Jackman's pre-_Wolverine_ interview, full of good-natured bitching about bulk-up diets.

I'd like to pretend it's the first time my conscience has ruined a perfectly fucking great lunch, but it isn't. Too much time in southeast Asia has given me food issues to rival Christian's.

My anorexic pity party is interrupted by an eye-poppingly painful slap to the ass. I turn, not sure if my fist or the sharp side of my tongue should be answering for the assault. My aggression evaporates in the face of Julia's toothy grin.

Her eyes flash and the chemistry between us crackles as if Lucy just waved it into the ring. "Owed you one, cowboy," she says with the lilt of her natural accent.

I want her to pull me over her lap, squeezing my disobedient cock between her legs as she spanks me. I want to shove her against the wall hard enough to bruise her translucent skin. I want to wrap my hand around her throat and kiss the fuck out of her.

I swallow a bite of repulsive poultry and turn away because I am not fit to be in public right now but I'm always, always in fucking public.

"Careful, Dave," calls a voice from behind me. "We finished off the Red Room of Pain set earlier. You don't want that tigress dragging you in there before you sign something."

I flash a careless grin, my rote memorization supplying a name. Kent, from art department.

"All's fair in love and war. If I don't miss my guess, I'm about to owe her somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-six hours of embarrassingly feigned pain and arousal."

Julia bumps my hip with hers. "All you owe me is one of your good Northwestern microbrews and a sappy line in your Oscar acceptance speech."

She chooses a pear and takes a bite, the juices glistening on her full lips. She winks at me. "He's right. We're going hard-core this afternoon, cowboy. The only thing that stands between us and a revolution in wide-release films is a crew that can translate brilliance into camera angles."

Kent sets down the box of supplies that he's carrying. Cardboard, styrofoam, spray paint. Three kinds of glue. The usual raw ingredients that art department's magicians use to create a world.

Kent smiles at Julia, and I remember that the reason I know his name is that he has the confidence not to go the deference or the disrespect road in his interactions with the actors.

"Hope you powdered your ass this morning," he teases her slyly.

She swats his arm, and then steps aside so he can get to the food table. "You just better have padded those benches with something other than Styrofoam. I've got bony knees. You hungry? The butternut squash soup is kind of amazing." It's pure Julia, playful sarcasm unable to conceal the sweetness beneath.

"How's the Red Room set?" I ask, keeping my voice relaxed.

"It's a hard-on in red leather," Kent says, ladling himself a bowl of soup. "Excuse the language, Julia."

She grins wickedly. "Don't forget who's going to put the hard-on in all that red leather. I don't think you should be excusing your language to the likes of me."

He chuckles and I should be laughing too, except my cold chicken is threatening to make a reappearance.

"How long do we have before we have to be sexy?" I ask Julia, pulling the trash can out for her so she can dispose of the core of her pear.

"Forty minutes, I think." She smiles. "Think I'll write an opera. Maybe paint a little."

"America's Top Model in your dressing room, again?"

She giggles and shoves me lightly. "Don't give away all my secrets, David."

"Red Room of Pain this afternoon, darlin'," I drawl. "You aren't going to have any secrets left." I toss off the last sentence while walking backwards toward my dressing room because I am pretty sure I'm about to need a trash can of my own and I'd rather it not be the one holding the remnants of Julia's snack.

She has to pretend to be attracted to me for another eight hours or so, and yakking in front of her isn't going to help her get into the right mental space for that.

I slam the door of my dressing room, yank the wastebasket out from under my dressing table and lean over it, panting in a very non-sexy way. Goddamn dry chicken. I was right. Craft services on this job is total shit.

I'm salivating queasily but not vomiting because my problem has nothing to do with bad food.

My traitorous brain is playing a high-speed, high-definition montage of images of whips laid across Julia's perfect ass. Sophie's sweetest Emily Wellington smile, her hair in a perky ponytail. The first dog I had to shoot, when it was too old and sick to keep suffering and I was too old for my dad to do it for me and too young to not go sobbing to my mother when it was all over.

I shake my head and shove the wastebasket away. "What the fuck, Dave?"

Am I having some kind of Catholic-guilt-flavored psychotic break? My dad asked me about that once, in his taciturn, third-Coors-Lite kind of way.

"_Doesn't it get old?"_

"_What, Dad?"_

"_Everything being imaginary."_

I shake my head. "Screw that."

I check my prop watch. It's a flawlessly faux Rolex and keeps great time. I've still got thirty-five minutes to be myself instead of Christian Grey, and nothing in my dressing room feels like home, so I flop into my chair and call my mother.

"Hi sweetie," she says brightly. "I didn't think I'd hear from you until next month at least. Aren't you shooting?"

"Sure, but I'm a big star now. They give me half an hour here and there if I'm really good," I tease.

"They'd give you whatever you wanted if you would ever ask for it," she reminds me.

This is an old argument and I sidestep it.

"How are things at home?"

"Humid. I used to hate working in the greenhouse in the summer, and now I'd give anything to do it, if my darn hands were up to it. Not that I'm complaining. They still work, and I'm far from starving in the streets."

"Are you still teaching that yoga class?"

"And loving it. I've got four or five students that come every week. That might not sound like much, but people these days aren't that great at showing up on a regular basis, you know what I mean? I guess they're busy. There are a lot of things to occupy your mind nowdays, and it probably is difficult to wrestle an hour for yourself with everything else going on."

I smile despite myself, lulled by her familiar rhythm of complaint and justification. She never wants to see the negative in anything or anyone, but she is too clear-sighted to ignore it, either.

"How are you? Is filming going okay? I've been worried about you and that crazy new movie," she says.

"I'm just proud as can be, told everybody in my class that you landed the role. This one woman went on and on about how happy she was for you and made me promise to tell you that she hopes Alex and Emily get together in Season Four and that she'll be happy to pick off some writers from a water tower if they don't." She takes a belated breath.

"I know that's your show, not your movie, honey, but the Cassie was really excited about both and I just know you'll do an amazing job but that movie is really out there, isn't it? Challenging, I guess you actors would say. Good to get a new role. I'm rambling, aren't I? How is it, really?"

"Great, mom. My co-star is really talented and a lot of fun. Sophie's movie is filming nearby, you remember, so that's good too."

"Did you talk her into moving in with you this time?"

"Sort of. We're sharing an apartment, for the five minutes we're both awake and together every day. _Fifty Shades_ recruited a lot of top-shelf talent, and you know how what that does to the shooting schedule."

"I know it does, honey. But you tell them you can't look so handsome if you don't ever get to sleep."

"I've got your genes, mom," I tease. "I don't need sleep to look handsome."

She starts off on another tangent about Cassie and her yoga class and I just let her voice wash over me until I realize that she hasn't asked me anything in a few minutes. Her rambling is nice, but she never makes more than one statement before she brings the conversation back to you. It bounces back to her life, then yours, then hers, the rhythm as predictable as tennis. She's out of pattern today.

Shit.

I cut her off in the middle of a description of her just-in-time adjustment of a woman who was doing a headstand in a very dangerous fashion.

"Mom, what's wrong?"

Silence. "Nothing's wrong, dear. Why, are you okay? They are working you too hard, aren't they? I am going to call Bill, he's such a sweetheart, but I worry he's not aggressive enough to do a good job as an agent. I just know-,"

"Mom." I cut her off again, all the crap with Julia and the Red Room gone in an instant, my fingers squeezing the phone dangerously tightly. Since the divorce, she has a million friends, but I'm really her only family. There's no one there to look after her when I work too many shifts and forget to call.

The silence is fretful and I refuse to disturb it.

I hear something on the other end of the line. Clinking, like she might be doing dishes.

"You're just on break, aren't you, honey?"

I don't answer.

"Why don't you call me on your day off?"

She knows I'm not going to get a day off for a while. The filming schedule for this is patched together with a hope and a dream to get everybody they wanted away from different commitments for sixty full days. We need ninety and we won't get it.

I clench my jaw and start mentally reviewing the language in my contract about days for family emergencies. It isn't Julia or me that has the worst schedule limitations, or Lucy. Maybe we can shift the non-essential scenes if it is just a cameraman or producer that can't stay for the whole haul.

I flip my laptop open and start searching my emails, trying to find the spreadsheet of time commitments that production sent me. I never opened it. Schedules aren't my job and I was free when I needed to be. But if I'm going to convince crazy Lucy to give me time off to see my mother, I need to know what my argument is.

My mom sighs heavily and I look up from the laptop. She's going to actually tell me. My stomach squeezes. I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear whatever she has to say.

"They found a lump."

My brain struggles to piece this sentence together. My head is crammed full of scripts, witty banter laden with sensual subtext. The words my mother has just spoken don't make sense in the context I've been living in.

"What?"

"In my breast, honey. I got my physical, like I have every year since we had that talk, and they found a lump this time."

Her voice gets tight. I don't know why she thinks this hides her tears but she's done as long as I can remember. Her voice will get higher as her throat gets tighter until the tension pushes one of us into tears. For the last fifteen years since I have been firmly ensconced in puberty, she always breaks before I do. This time, I'm not so sure who will blink first.

"What?" I say again, because it is all I can manage. Words are pounding through my mind. Every script and press release I have memorized since I started acting when I was twelve. None of them will help me now.

"It might be nothing. They don't know if it can actually hurt me, if it is benign or malignant. They have to do tests."

"When?"

"I told them whenever they had time."

"_Now_, mom. You don't have to wait for insurance. You know that. You do whatever needs to be done and I will pay for it."

"Well, I mean, I made an appointment."

It takes a long time to figure when her appointment is and when it should be, between my throat that is trying to close up shop and her unwillingness to be a bother to anyone, even people whose entire job consists of deciding which lumps are okay and which lumps will Hurricane Katrina your fucking life.

There is a careful, production assistant knock on the door and in the silence, my mom hears it before I do.

"You have to go, sweetie. Don't worry about me. I feel fine. It is probably nothing. You know how doctors are."

I don't say anything. Her voice goes from high to gentle. "David. I'm _fine_. Do your job. If I was sick, I would tell you."

She takes a deep breath. "Even if it is malignant, I feel fine. I have plenty of time. And I'm your mother. I have to die sometime. So do your damn job and get me a golden statue to show off to my friends."

She never swears.

"I love you. I'm hanging up now. You're late," she says firmly.

The line goes dead.

The production assistant knock comes again and I realize I never answered.

"How long, Sara?"

Pause. "Two minutes?"

Fuck. "I'm sorry, Nicole. You can open the door, you know."

"It's your private time. I don't want to interrupt."

I grimace at the carpet. "It's a little weird having a relationship with you that involves my door as a mediator."

She actually laughs. "Yeah. I guess. Minute and a half. Can I get you anything?"

"Another five minutes?" I stand up. "Just kidding. I'm ready."

I don't even see the Red Room when I enter it. I let myself slip gratefully away and instead the controlled, patrician posture of Christian Grey organizes my body. I don't fight his anticipation of the games to come.

My brain provides all my lines, all my cues, and a totally wrecked David apparently equals a normal Christian Grey. I spend the next few hours devoted to inflicting his delicate balance of torment and tenderness on my co-star. Lucy wraps all the scenes in only a few takes and sends us all home three hours early.

Julia jokes cheerfully with me all the way to my car and when I get inside the smile drops off my face like a too-fragile prop.


	7. Chapter 7

I drive home, and the only thought I have the whole way is that mostly comatose really is the best to feel if you have to deal with L.A. traffic.

My brain is still on vacation when I arrive, so I never question why I park three blocks away in a spot that somebody else probably needs, and walk back to our rented cottage and its empty driveway.

Jackson's leapingly happy to see me, as always. I know it is irresponsible to work the hours I do and have a dog, but I can't freaking help it. I pay very good money to make sure he gets more exercise and attention than any two dogs will ever need, and the few minutes I get in his company every day make it all worth it.

I go into the backyard and don't turn on a porch light. I lay on the chaise lounge by the pool in the lengthening shadows and pet Jackson until his fur is in danger. He doesn't seem to mind.

I want to call my mom, but I know that I will just sit helplessly silent on one end of the phone until she starts to cry on the other. I'm not going to call just to make my mother cry. I text that I love her, and then I sit there with my phone in my hand and the vague thought that I should call someone else. My phone vibrates a few times with texts from various people. I don't read the words, but I find the notifications oddly soothing.

I hear Sophie come home and rustle around the house for a while. She doesn't see me or my car, so she must think I'm not home.

Jackson whines quietly. If there's anyone he loves more than me, it's Sophie. I can't blame him. Still, tonight he keeps my secret and he doesn't run for the sliding glass door to remind her that he's out here, awaiting attention. He just whimpers and shifts restlessly until the sounds cease and the lights inside are extinguished.

I listen to city noises of cars and distant voices until I fall asleep.

I wake up to vibration and because my mind's lived in the gutter for weeks, I think it is a giant sex toy in my shoe. Then the sparse stars and the faint city glow of the sky come into focus and I realize that I fell asleep outside and the air is cool but I'm warm.

I look down. I'm lying with one leg on the concrete, dangerously close to sliding off the chaise lounge. Jackson is curled up by my side, his weight digging into my elbow. I taste a piece of his hair that has worked its way into my mouth.

My right leg has lost all circulation, because Sophie is laying on it. Her head is pillowed just inside my hip joint, the buckle of my belt pressing into her forehead. She's dead asleep but shivering with her whole body.

I smile and roll my eyes. Of course she is. Her sleeping self may have a homing instinct for me, but it isn't much for self-preservation. She's wearing tiny shorts and a camisole that is long on ribbons and lace and short on insulation and she's so slender that even the warm California nights chill her.

I sit up and gather her into my arms. I stand, stumbling gracelessly on my numb leg and stomp once or twice to start the painful pins and needles. I probably shouldn't have picked her up until I had all my limbs in order. She stirs against me.

"David?"

"I'm here. Go back to sleep. I'll get you warm soon."

She rubs her eyes, squinting around in confusion.

"Rental house, California," I say out of habit. We move a lot, and she wakes up slow and fuzzy-like.

She slumps back against me with a groan. "Why the hell do we have a pool?"

"We needed a yard for Jackson, and apparently nobody in California has ever considered having a dry yard," I remind her, stamping my half-numb foot again and wincing.

She rubs her face against me, heedless of the ridiculously expensive shirt I'm still wearing that technically belongs to wardrobe. Wardrobe department, in my opinion, is the only entity who should ever pay that much for mere fabric.

"Let's go swimming," she says through a yawn.

"You're hypothermic already," I tell her practically. "Even though it is like eighty degrees. If you get in the water, I'll have to drive you to the hospital."

"Or you'll have to supervise me in the shower," she says, an impish smile peeking out beneath her sleepy brown eyes. She glances quickly behind her and then swings her legs hard, tipping me off my precarious one-legged balance. We fall, expensive costume clothes and all, into the pool.

I come up sputtering and reaching for her. She spits water at me and I dunk her, crowing triumphantly and then stroking hard for the other side of the pool.

She's a fast swimmer, but I tag the opposite side a full body length ahead of her. She pushes hair out of her face and sticks her tongue out at me.

I grin smugly at her. "Can't be good at everything, love."

She shoves at her heavy, wet hair. "I'm apparently not funny. I don't think swimming would be a terrible consolation prize."

I think about refuting her, but it never freaking works. She's really hard on herself, and comedy is a killer if you don't have great writers, everybody says so.

"You can't be pretty _and_ witty," I remind her, waiting for her to catch the rhythm of our old joke. "Nobody is."

"Except Josh," we finish in unison, and she laughs despite herself. We've been flogging that old saying since season one, and Josh's never heard a thing about it. Never will.

She splashes me and I mock glare at her, my body feeling alive for the first time today. Like it belongs to me again.

"I'm freezing," she admits, paddling over to me and looping her arms around my neck. Her kiss tastes like chlorine and cinnamon toothpaste. It's my new favorite taste.

"I think you're winning the wet T-shirt contest," she says.

I glance down. My white dress shirt is plastered to me, and her lacy camisole isn't doing any better. It decorates her round breasts in a way that speaks to the most primitive part of me.

I slip my hands under the hem of her shirt, enjoying the graceful curve of her back as I bring her closer to me. Her hard nipples scorch my chest through two inadequate layers of wet fabric.

She licks the water droplets from my bottom lip, a mischievous gleam in her eye. "Warm me up?" she whispers.

"No problem," I murmur, my eyes on her lips as I lift her into my arms again. In the water, we're both weightless.


	8. Chapter 8

I cross my ankle over my knee and remind my leg not to bounce with excess energy. I'm in a folding chair just offstage waiting for my cue.

I've got the afternoon off to film an interview with Entertainment Weekly. They negotiated with the studio for this particular exclusive of the making of _Fifty Shades of Grey_. It's like no one ever told the public that making one movie is pretty much the fucking same as making another movie, unless you have a lot of special effects. In our case, there will probably be something in the DVD extras about what we did with the bondage equipment. Not too much magic there.

Interviews always get me wound up, because if you aren't on your toes, you can never think of the right answer before they are moving on to the next question. Unfortunately, they also make me fidgety, which plays poorly on camera. My publicist has spent a lot of time lecturing me on this point.

I need to invent an interview persona and just play the part when I go, but interviews are supposed to be about being real, letting your fans see a glimpse of the person behind all the scripts. So they are stuck with over-caffeinated, fidgety me.

I catch my cue and stride onto stage, smiling my leading-man smile. The interviewer is young and blonde. I catch a glimpse of her shoes. They are the cruelly pointy, really damn expensive kind. Shit.

She lobs me a couple easy ones, and I give the speech about how Christian Grey's character has been abused but that doesn't mean that BDSM is always for people with issues.

"At its core, BDSM is about control, and about both partners learning to be their best selves for each other," I tell the blonde shark.

"That's a very interesting answer. Did you have a personal interest in BDSM that led you to accept this role?"

Wow, it didn't take her long to cut to the chase. Can she really ask me that?

Years of choosing my facial expressions keeps me looking politely interested instead of murderous, but I can't think of a thing to say to her that doesn't include the words 'fuck' and 'you.' So I call up Alex Harper's character and let him save my sorry ass.

Alex armors my face with a knowing smirk. "Do you have a personal interest in my preferences?"

She pretends to be embarrassed and laughs, but she's just hamming it.

"No, I think people get caught up in the novelty," I backtrack for the serious answer, reminding myself that I'm talking to the fans, not this interviewer. "But I think it is important that people see through that to realize what the BDSM in this story can tell you about the characters."

"Tell me more about that. Are we talking trial through fire, here?"

"In a sense. You have this man who can't really express himself except through this really controlled form of violence, and a woman that desperately loves him enough to go along with these things she would normally never do. And I think people like the book because that love really does transform him, and takes him to places that he's not comfortable with."

"So just like any relationship, it's all about trust," she says, and I nod, surprised to find we agree.

"Speaking of that, I know a lot of people wanted to see Sophie Rybak cast as Anastasia Steele. How has it been for you two since Julia Grant was given the role instead?"

"Actually, Sophie got the casting call for Anastasia, but turned it down," I correct.

That's right, bitch. My girl can pick and choose her roles. "We both felt that it wouldn't be fair to have the same pairing we have on _Queen of Hearts_, that it would cause people to miss subtleties in these new, unique characters in _Fifty Shades_."

"So how did you two decide which of you would go after _Fifty Shades_?" The reporter asks, and I bite back a sigh because I knew these questions were coming, but they are so tedious.

"We read the books, and I was immediately intrigued by the part of Christian Grey. Sophie was very supportive of that, and to be honest, she wasn't that interested in playing Ana. In fact, she's doing another movie right now, a comedy that I think is going to come out great."

I talk about Sophie's new movie, burning interview time remorselessly until the interviewer cuts me off. If she wants to blather on about my personal life, then I can damn well waste her precious exclusive plugging Sophie's movie as well as my own.

"So is it hard on Sophie, knowing that you're doing all these sexy, sexy scenes with the lovely Julia?" The reporter asks with a salicious smile that just looks bloodthirsty on her over-powdered face.

"No comment," I say tightly.

I'm furious that this bitch just went there, even though everybody and their dog told me that it would be a common question. I just hate that because I work in movies, everybody thinks my business is their business.

Now, I grit my teeth because that 'no comment' is going to have Sophie and I broken up on every tabloid cover and fan site within two days.

Alex steps back in, and my anger gratefully relaxes into his arrogance. I stretch my legs out in front of me, crossing them at the ankles, my normal interview twitchiness gone as I lock my fingers behind my head and give the interviewer a crooked smile that makes her eyes drop to my lips for a bare second. Tut, tut, so unprofessional.

"You know I don't like to kiss and tell," I say coyly. "But no, it's a very intimate movie. I think that is what people are going to like about it. And Julia was well cast. She plays Ana brilliantly."

"What about Sophie?" the reporter says, still trying for the kill.

You're not fit to lick her shoes, you vicious bulldog bitch.

I laugh with just a hint of condescension. "On _Queen of Hearts_, she's been in love with my brother for three years, and I have a new girl in my bed every week. We're no stranger to sex scenes. They're essential to the work. It's not a concern for us." I keep it light, but no one will miss my implication that we can tell real from make-believe, even if she can't.

"So this is a pretty big step for your career, this wide-release film that may expand into a new franchise," she says sweetly.

I fight back a laugh. Point taken. Don't try to out-passive-aggressive a professional.

"Well, I have a pretty long resume but even so, this is definitely a new kind of role for me. Mostly I was just excited about the exposure because of what it could do for my charity work."

That's right. Remember my latest fundraising campaign, which this appearance agreement requires you to mention, even though you haven't yet? Point to me.

"Is the movie supporting your charity?" she asks, making it sound sleazy, and also as if I am off-topic to plug my charity work at all.

I have a stock answer, but the more earnest I am, the cattier she will look.

"I am incredibly lucky," I tell her. "I have a job I love, and a side effect of that is that it makes people very interested in what I have to say." I smile ruefully. "Probably undeservedly. So I figured that if people were going to listen, the least I could do was have something important to say."

"That's very admirable of you," she says, her voice a lot more convincing than her sharky eyes. "Isn't it kind of an odd combination, though? Using a movie that is about tying a girl up and beating her to raise money to fight sex trafficking in southeast Asia?"

I'm livid, but Alex has no problem with the question. "It seems pretty simple to me. All bondage should be consensual."

The reporter scrambles after that verbal slap, but the best she can do is, "Do you have any plans for a more direct tie-in?"

"You know, you'd be surprised. People don't need to be tricked into participating by using a popular movie to make it more attractive. They just need to know what is going on, and a vehicle that allows them to make a difference." I shrug. "I'm a glorified bell ringer. All I do is make it easy for busy people to contribute to the world the way they want to, without having to miss work or give up time with their kids to do it."

Alex Harper is shining in the role of David Tate, feeding my words to the reporter with a calculated insolence that makes me look like less of a do-gooder prat and implies that she thinks people have to be coerced to care about child prostitutes and sex slavery.

I smile sardonically. "Maybe I should put something together, though, just for fun. A Fifty Strokes campaign on Twitter where we make Julia the whipping boy for all of Asia. People can pledge a certain amount of money for abused kids every time I spank Julia during filming."

"A dollar a stroke or something?" she laughs.

It's a ridiculous idea, borderline inappropriate, but she has to play along, so I banter with her about the fundraising possibilities until our time is up. Josh was right. Promos for this one are going to be a bitch. The dead last thing I want to be doing is discussing my feelings about this movie.

This is exactly why I started fundraising, years ago. I prefer dental work over discussing my personal life with strangers, and if someone is going to benefit from my discomfort, I like to choose who it is going to be.

As I stand up and wave my goodbye to the studio filming audience, I feel naked. People think that celebrities are so rich and powerful, but sometimes it feels like the only power I have is to choose what role I am going to play next. Nobody cares who I choose to be, as long as it isn't myself.

* * *

_Author's Note: Sorry for the short chapter- I promise a quick update. We've got some intense stuff coming up! Thanks to everybody who has been reading and leaving reviews, I've really enjoyed hearing what you guys thought and where you thought the story should go. This is a very interesting, interactive kind of story, with so many layers of realities and audiences._


	9. Chapter 9

Chelsea in makeup is trying to blind me. I lock my fingers in my lap and let my eyes water freely. She'll have to repair the damage, but that's what she gets for not knowing how to do eyeliner the subtle way.

You'd think after a month, she'd learn, but she hasn't. I texted Patti, my makeup artist on _Queen of Hearts_, a joking complaint last week, and she sent back: _Babe, you know those baby blues are my favorite canvas. Don't make me fly out there to protect them._

Julia perches on the counter in front of me, cuddled into one of her chunky knitted sweaters. She dresses like an Eskimo, but then the second we're filming, she's like steel. Hours of next to naked filming and she will never ask for a warm-up break.

"Are you enjoying this?" I ask her through my tears.

"Karma's a bitch," she says with a wide grin. "I had to come in a half hour early so they could powder every bit of me into perfection."

"Ah, that can't have taken longer than ten minutes."

"Yeah, but it took the other twenty minutes to feed me enough coffee that they could come close without an animal control officer on hand."

I smile and Chelsea looks annoyed at how it crinkles my eyes. I relax obediently, but Julia makes faces to try and make me smile until I give her the finger behind Chelsea's back.

Julia laughs and flips me off right back, then hops down from the counter. "Well, I'd best be off to wardrobe."

"You should have left more time. How are you going to choose which birthday suit to wear?"

"That's easy. I like the one with the fuzzy ears."

I chuckle and now Chelsea looks close to tears. I'm glad for the distraction. If there's anything harder than getting in the mood for BDSM, it's doing it at five o'clock in the morning.

Chelsea finally finishes, bursting with apologies.

"No worries," I say with a wink and a grin.

I check my phone on the way out of the room. Nothing. Mom is scheduled for her tests today, which she absolutely refused to let me fly down for. After that, we still have to wait for the lab results. She still claims that she feels fine, but I can't decide if I should believe her or not.

Either way, I can't go think about it right now. I've got to work.

* * *

"Do you want me to do this?" I breathe, cradling Julia's face.

"Are you going to hit me?" Her lovely eyes reproach me.

"Yes, but not to hurt you. You haven't earned a punishment today."

She licks her lips hesitantly, her breathing ragged.

These scenes are so easy, the sexual tension between us humming effortlessly. I kiss her, angling our faces just right for the lighting, all lips and no tongue because it's for the audience's enjoyment, not mine. Her hands flutter up toward my face before she pretends to remember she's not supposed to touch me and fists them next to her sides. I pull away, my eyes hot. She wordlessly nods her consent.

I take her to the door of the Red Room and stand behind her as she looks inside, her eyes caught by all the unfamiliar bondage equipment. I pull her dress up over her head, so slowly that I can watch gooseflesh break out across her skin as I expose more and more of it.

I drop the dress in a puddle of satin and skim my fingertips up her arms. My head is bent to hers, so that even standing behind her, I can see her pulse pounding in the hollow of her throat. She's either acting really well, or she's letting herself get into it a little bit.

I touch the outer rim of her ear with my lips and unhook her bra, unhurriedly drawing the straps down her arms. I'm standing close enough to feel the heat of her skin.

I gather her hair in my hands and gently braid it away from her face.

I used to braid my sister's hair when we were really little. We'd play this game where we were explorers on the Amazon and if I braided long pieces of grass into her hair, it gave her the power to wrestle the alligators away from our raft. I always wished I had long hair, because without the grass, I couldn't wrestle the alligators.

It's a nice contrast, this moment, so I milk it a little bit before I grab the braid and tip her head back so I can look at her when I order her onto her knees.

She obeys, folding to the ground a little clumsily. She's gloriously almost naked, but still looks like a very young girl far out of her element. I crush my twinge of guilt, letting Christian run the show for me.

He's excited to have her in his playroom, and he's ecstatic as he glides over to his chest of toys and chooses a brown leather riding crop.

Lucy cuts right then so that Hair and Makeup can redo the braid I put in Julia's hair into something more attractive.

The crop should feel natural in my hand. I've ridden horses my whole life, and I know perfectly well that you can use this as a tool very effectively without causing any pain. It's all about the rider and knowing how to apply cues as communication instead of cruelty. But you hold it differently when you're riding a horse.

I shift the whip a few times, trying for a position that feels like it fits my hand.

"I don't know, David, I think Hair and Makeup should hire you," Julia calls to me. "How are you with a speed-herringbone?"

"Depends," I say, letting a little backwoods southern into my tone. "You talkin' about gutting a fish or doing up your hair?"

She grins and I pretend like I don't know exactly what she's doing.

Lucy calls the cameras back on.

I watch Julia from across the room as she kneels, eyes turned submissively to the floor. I lay the whip conspicuously on a padded bench and pull Julia to her feet. This new braid allows just a few hairs free to soften her face, but leaves her reactions exposed for the world to see.

"Give me your hand."

My voice deepens with inexorable command. I planned on changing my voice for the Red Room scenes when I was preparing for the role originally, but once I saw the set I did it without even thinking about it.

Julia holds out her palm. I slap the riding crop against it, and she flinches, though I didn't do it hard enough to sting.

"Did that hurt?"

Her brow creases, and she hesitates before answering. "No."

"This isn't going to hurt," I tell her. "Do you trust me?"

"Yes," she says, but her eyes say no. They are filled with apprehension and more than a little fear.

I give her no further reassurance, just pull her arms over her head and secure them with leather cuffs. I yank her legs apart and cuff them too, being a little rough so the close-ups of my hands will be more dramatic. I wonder if the boom mike will catch the changes in Julia's breathing, because the sounds she's making are subtle but they're driving me insane. I'm hoping they will turn on an audience.

I have no idea what she is doing to me. Nothing I want done, that's for damn sure.

Sophie slept through her run this morning, and I woke nuzzled into her neck, her soft breast cupped in my hand. I want to stay in that memory, but then I realize that is not the headspace I'm supposed to be going for right now. I release the image reluctantly.

I stroke the whip over Julia's skin and her lips part with reluctant excitement. Jesus, she's good at this. If it wasn't a huge professional faux pas, I'd ask her if these scenes really turn her on.

I flick the whip against her and she gasps.

"How does that feel?"

"Um, okay?"

I stripe the whip across her ass. This is easier to fake with a riding crop. It looks so much more vicious than it is. Even so, the sound when it slaps her skin punches me in the throat.

My brain is playing the sound of the belt hitting that vinyl cushion that couldn't have been thick enough, couldn't have been enough to protect her. The sound is so loud in my memory that it takes me a second too long to realize I've missed my cue. I turn on my heel and look at Julia, making the pause look deliberate.

"Okay, what?"

She looks puzzled. I am supposed to hit her again. Fuck, fuck, fuck. My hand tingles and goes weirdly numb. Am I having a heart attack? No, it's my right arm, not my left. It's your left arm for a heart attack, isn't it?

I'm missing my goddamn cue again. The realization makes me move too quickly and I stop the arc of the whip at the last second. I think I stopped it early enough so that it couldn't hurt, but her whole body flinches away from it, so I can't be sure.

She's supposed to react like this and she's a crazy-tough actress so she's not going to even say anything if I'm hurting her. With these camera angles, we can't use the cushion and everyone's counting on me to make it look real without it _being _real.

No one should be counting on me for anything. My thoughts are jumbling, screaming together until I can't make out anything that's happening inside me. I just know that it is loud, loud, fucking deafening.

"Okay, _Sir,"_ she says.

I stop in front of Julia. Christian is piloting my body; moving it smoothly, confidently around while my brain eats itself alive.

He tips her chin up with the crop, his eyes bright with excitement. The tip of the crop traces the line of her throat, quivering with her uneven breathing, over her delicate collarbones and to her breasts. Apparently an R-rating will allow us to show her topless, and I'm sure the male half of America is going to be very happy about that, because the sight is pretty inspiring.

Right now, all I can think as the plaited leather touches her nipple is that breasts are beautiful. Soft, nurturing.

My mother's might be killing her right now.

I'm supposed to be hitting Julia's breasts with this whip.

The riding crop is shaking. Christian has apparently lost control of my right hand. The leather rises as if to strike and my throat seizes as I gag harshly. I double over, coughing explosively. The whip drops to the floor but I can feel the line of it burned into my palm.

I need to get the fuck out of here before I cough up an internal organ, but I can't leave Julia cuffed helplessly naked in front of all these people, stuck until someone thinks to take her down.

I turn my mouth against my shoulder so I won't cough on her face, but I can't stop gagging. I rip her cuffs free and then I'm gone, shoving blindly through crew members.

My dressing room door slams behind me, but I still can't stop coughing. It's like I'm trying to choke up my soul but it's staying put, poisoning me from the inside.

I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me, so I just prop my elbows on my knees and convulse with the force of the attack.

Lucy is pounding on my door, and I'm sure she's going to let herself in. I don't have enough breath to tell her to fuck off. If she tries to give me the Heimlich, I'm not going to be responsible for my actions.

There are voices outside my door but I can't hear what they're saying. I clamp my mouth shut and my esophagus convulses as I try to get myself under control. I'm not choking on anything, but if I don't stop this, I'm going to break something.

I grab the trash can and spit weakly into it. Tears are running unchecked down my face and I really hope they are just from coughing.

Finally, I manage a breath and it tastes great. Another. Another.

Lucy is gone. The tension leaves my muscles until I'm barely sitting upright.

I make myself get up and find a water bottle, taking careful sips to sooth my throat. Reality is starting to sink back in. I'm in a dressing room, in a studio. I'm halfway through the filming of a movie and I actually _cannot_ finish it.

I run through the remaining scenes. The belt scene is the worst. I didn't get through all of it the day we filmed- they are supposed to have a fight and all this stuff after the beating. It's pivotal, but Lucy said we could cut it together later. She didn't ask for another take, but she didn't call wrap, either. She didn't ask me why I didn't finish.

I sit back down. I don't think I can do it. I don't even really know why, but I just know that if I try to raise a hand to Julia again, no matter how phony, I will come apart at the seams. This is so far past absurd I don't even know what to think.

I've played serial killers, bad guys of all different stripes. I've never played a rapist or a child molester, but that's it. I actually love to play criminals, though I usually get cast as the love interest because I'm a little too pretty for most villain casting.

I'm perfectly capable of coming in and out of character at will and I've never, never had trouble telling the difference before.

There's a knock on my door. It's not who I want to see, so I don't even lift my head.

"David?" It's Julia's voice, quiet but firm. "I'm coming in."

I revise my opinion. There's at least one person I want to see even _less_ than Lucy. I scrape a hand over my face tiredly.

The door opens. I stand up, putting the trash can back under my dressing table.

"Hey, sorry about that. I must have swallowed wrong or something," I clear my throat and smile apologetically. "Super sexy, huh?"

She's wearing a floor length robe with bare feet, her braid a little rumpled. She looks like the kind of girl you wish you'd find having coffee in your kitchen in the morning. I want her to go away.

Julia's eyes are kind. "Don't bullshit me, David."

She closes the door behind her and spies my iPod hooked up to my tiny speakers. She walks over and hits the button without looking to see what it will play, then drops the speakers in front of the door.

I narrow my eyes. "What are you doing?"

"Giving us some privacy." Her lips quirk into an ironic little smile. "For once."

"I don't think we need privacy," I say, and glory hallelujah, twenty years of acting is actually getting me somewhere, pretty fucking belatedly. I give her a puzzled look that's about 25% scorn, 5% condescension.

"I think I need a Halls mentholated and you need to not be in my room in an outfit that begs an 'on-set-source' to spill his guts to _Star _about our secret affair."

She sits on the old loveseat in the corner and cocks her head at me. "I'm sorry we don't really know each other very well. If we did, maybe I would have said something earlier." She pauses, touching her hand as if searching for a ring she's used to wearing. "Something's wrong, isn't it?"

"Look, Julia…" My voice sounds like I have early-stage emphysema. I really did a number on my throat.

"I appreciate the concern and I don't want to be a dick cause maybe it's different at HBO, but where I'm from you don't hang out in your co-star's dressing room in a thong and a robe unless you're hoping to take them off, and that's not happening here. So if you want to have a heart to heart, let's do it somewhere that won't start quite so many interesting rumors, hey?" I _am_ being a dick. Absolutely, and I can be more of a dick if it will make her get the hell out of my room and stop looking at me with those treacherously sympathetic eyes.

Julia crosses her arms. "Do you really want an audience while we talk about the fact that something's been wrong with you in every single Red Room scene we've done?"

"Yeah, something is wrong with me. I'm playing a sadistic, emotionally unavailable trauma victim, which probably, newsflash!, makes me come off like ass. Next problem? Oh, should I turn the speakers onto some Barry Manilow while we have this chat? How about a tie on the doorknob?"

Julia's looking at me like my diary is written all over my face and she can't stop reading. My hands twitch in my lap. I realize my fingers have curled into fists and deliberately relax them.

"You're afraid of hurting me, aren't you?" she whispers. "You hate this. Your face the other day after we did that scene with the belt… but then a second later you seemed fine, so I thought it was just part of the scene."

She reaches for me and I flinch. It is the first nail in my coffin because she is never going to goddamn leave now.

Julia slides off the couch and kneels down next to my chair.

"David, you didn't hurt me." She tries to take my hands and I turn away but she won't let me. "You _never _hurt me."

I rip my hands out of her grasp and stalk across the room to the door, peering out as if I'm checking for eavesdroppers. I couldn't give a shit if there was a brass band in the hallway, I just can't let her touch me.

_You cried_, I want to scream at her. But of course she cried, she was _acting. _She is supposed to cry and every part of me knows that except my gut, which is twisting itself into a whole zoo-full of origami animals.

She lays a hand on my back and I slam the door shut to cover my reaction, stomping away and flinging myself back into my chair.

"What do you want from me?" I hiss. In my new, gravelly voice, this comes off sounding even more harsh than I intended it to.

"Oh, David," she whispers, and then she's hugging me, practically in my lap.

"Um."

I don't touch her. We're alone, and she's not exactly dressed and that never leads to anything good. I wasn't actually that worried about rumors before, but now I am. Sophie trusts me but if somebody walks in now and sees Julia wrapped around me like a vine, Sophie'd be pretty justified in being pissed.

"Please. Let me help. I can tell you're upset." Julia will not let go of me.

I pat her back a couple times, hoping that will satisfy her. But then I feel her spine under the robe. I can see the line of it in my memory, her kneeling naked before me on that padded bench.

I shudder deep down as the pat turns into a caress that is pure apology and then my arms are going around her, pulling her down into my lap. She hugs me tightly and my hands are running all down her arms and her back as if I can erase all the blows I have laid on her in the past month.

She knows. Dammit, she knows exactly what I'm thinking.

"Hey, it's okay. You don't have anything to be sorry for." She's cradling my head against her breasts. That is a bad idea, really not what I want anybody to see and not what I want to be doing. But I can't help myself because her tiny, breakable body is haunting me.

I take her arms and carefully push her away, getting her out of my lap. I shake my head, wishing I could be a little more coherent right now.

"Okay, I have a girlfriend that I love very much, and I probably shouldn't have done that, so please don't get the wrong idea. I-," I look up at my co-star.

I don't know her that well, and I'm not all about spilling my soul to people but the gig is up here. Sarcasm isn't going to cover up anything when they ask me to walk onto the Red Room set again and I won't.

"It's not working for me," I tell her, and the relief is dizzying.

She nods. "I know."

We're silent for a minute, because that is all I have to say. She seems to get it somehow. Again.

"Look, your voice is destroyed. You can't film today anyway," Julia says practically. "I'll deal with Lucy. There are some Katherine/Ana scenes we can do, and the visit to Ana's mom, if the sets are ready. Why don't you go home, or wherever you need to go to figure this out." She pauses and I can tell she's trying to decide if she wants to say something.

"We're too late into the movie to swap actors," she says baldly.

I glance away, because I know. Obviously, I know. It will wreck the budget and you don't wreck the budget of a high profile project like this, or any project, if you want to work in the business again.

She touches my chin and I don't flinch this time.

"But more than that, David. I don't want to do this movie with someone else. You are perfect for the part and-," she shrugs, her eyelashes flickering. "I trust you."

My heart squeezes at her words. I don't look at her.

Julia steps back, finally giving me some space. "So do what you need to do, but for what it's worth, I want you to come back. I'll help in whatever way you'll let me."

I manage a jerky nod and she lets herself out.

_Author's Note: I'd love to hear what people think about this chapter! This was the idea the whole fic was built around._


	10. Chapter 10

After Julia paves the way for me, I check in with Lucy. She winces at the sound of my destroyed voice and gives me the day off with nothing resembling good humor. There aren't that many scenes that don't require my presence, and the sets haven't been built for all of them.

This is a really expensive day off for me, and I'm not unaware that having my mental breakdown in the form of a coughing fit was actually a great idea because now everyone thinks that is all it was. And until my throat calms down, I won't be filming anything. I wonder if I could solve this whole issue by shoving a wire brush down my throat.

I am too chickenshit to call Sophie to come home and talk me through the career apocalypse I'm setting myself up for. Instead, I text her innocuously to ask what time she'll be home. The answer, of course, is late. She's been filming in twelve-hour shifts for weeks.

I haven't had an unscheduled day off in too long to remember, and I hardly know what to do with myself, much less what to do to start untangling this whole Christian Grey debacle.

In Hollywood, you don't admit that channeling a certain character is too much, too dark for you. You drink or you do drugs or cheap girls. Or you take the drugs and the booze all at once, enough that you don't have to face what you found inside your own head.

Instead I call my mom. She's had the tests done on the lump in her breast. She says she feels fine and there's nothing to do but wait until the lab reports come back. I tell her the movie is going fine.

Jackson and I go to a park and I throw a stick for him. We run around together until we're both exhausted and we flop into a heap together on the grass, panting and looking up at the clear blue sky. Maybe I'll just give up acting altogether and walk people's dogs for a living. Plenty of neglected dogs in the world. But I won't be able to do much fundraising without an acting career, and there are literally thousands of people that depend on that money.

When Sophie comes home, Jackson and I are on the couch. She smiles wanly and comes over to kiss me on the cheek.

"Hey, you. What are you doing?"

"Waiting for you."

She frowns. "Are you getting sick?"

"Why?" Now that she's actually here, I'm kind of freaked out about talking to her. I'll sound either like a pussy, or a headcase. I'm a little of both, currently, but it would be cool if my girlfriend didn't have to know that.

"Because you never sit and do nothing. Ever. And your voice sounds terrible. Are you getting a sore throat or something?"

"Not sick." If I don't do it now, I'm not going to and then I'll be back to square one because I have no idea how to fix this. Sophie always knows what to do, about pretty much anything. If I can just get the words past my reluctant lips. "I had the day off."

That gets an even stranger look. "No way. I thought they needed you to film like 23 hours a day or something."

"They do," I say bitterly. "I just shitcanned 12 hours of filming by walking out on the first scene of the day."

Sophie drops her purse onto the coffee table and sinks down on the couch. "I think you'd better tell me what's going on."

"My mom has a lump in her breast," I say, and my voice strains a little on the word lump, but it doesn't break.

Sophie's eyes widen. "What? Oh God, is she okay? Is it cancer? Is she sick? How are you doing? That's stupid, of course you're not okay, you walked out on filming-," she cuts herself off and crawls into my lap, wrapping her arms tightly around my neck.

The weight of her does what nothing else could- it presses the tension right out of my muscles. I take a deep breath, feeling like it is the first one in days. She's straddling me, holding my head against her chest just like Julia did earlier, but when Sophie does it, I feel like I'm home. Like I actually _have_ a home.

"We don't know," I tell her when she pulls away to look at me. "If it's cancer. She got some tests, and we have to wait for the lab results."

Sophie frowns. "She got some tests? How long has this been going on?"

"A few days." I shrug.

She looks at me like I'm an imbecile. "She's going to think I'm such a bitch that I haven't called or said anything about it."

I smile half-heartedly. "You forget, Soph, she's known me for a while now. She knows I would have put off telling you. I wouldn't have said anything until we knew for sure what it was. You don't need to be worrying about my mom or me while you're trying to film a comedy."

She smacks me in the arm. "What the hell, David? You're my life, and I love your mother. Please don't ever think I'm too busy to know what's going on with you. I mean, it's not like we're ever not busy."

"Yeah, well, I didn't know where to start. This movie-," I sigh. "This movie is eating me alive, and the news about my mom has just been festering in the middle of all the rest of it."

She shifts off my lap onto the couch next to me and I immediately miss the weight of her. "What's wrong with the movie?"

I rub my hands on the thighs of my jeans and she touches my shoulder with gentle fingers. I remember Christian's expression before the belt scene. Hopeful despair. Opening my mouth feels like lifting that belt.

Emotions are fleeing across my face, and for once I don't try to name them or control them.

"David?" There's a hesitation that wasn't there before and I see that her doubts have crept in, too. I start talking because I can't bear for her to be afraid.

I tell her all of it, every dirty, embarrassing, ridiculous detail. I don't even leave out the parts about her, about how I see her tied up, or in the scenes in the Red Room and sometimes it turns me on and sometimes it freaks me out and sometimes it makes me want to beat the hell out of anyone within six blocks of her.

I shouldn't have worried, though. Her brown eyes can hold every terrible thing I say.

Magically, the longer I talk, things start to sound like they make a little bit of sense. I can see a pattern instead of just a mess of emotions that I don't want to be feeling.

"You hate BDSM," she says when I run out of words. She shrugs. "That's okay."

"But what does it mean that I like it, too?" I say, still frustrated.

"If I was hearing you correctly, you like bondage, not punishment." She peeks through her eyelashes at me with the hint of a smile. "We can talk about that another time. I don't think I get why that upsets you."

"You don't?" I ask her skeptically. "Um, it's wasn't with you, and it's at work."

"Yeah, but David, if you like it, then of course it is going to turn you on when you're with _Julia_."

My eyebrows shoot up. What the hell is she implying?

"They hired a person you had good chemistry with. Newsflash, David. Chemistry is a euphemism for attraction."

I'm trying to read her face. She washed off her makeup before she left work, and she looks beautiful. What she does not look is angry.

"And this doesn't bother you?" I venture.

"You're attracted to lots of people. So am I. Some of them you choose to date and most of them you don't." She settles further into the couch, toying with a loose thread at the knee of my jeans.

"When normal people are in a happy relationship and they find themselves attracted to someone else, they avoid them until the feeling goes away. Actors, on the other hand, go to work with them for months while the writers crank the attraction up for all its worth. It's really messed up, actually."

I don't know how to take this. It's so…practical. Which is what we should be, obviously, but it's not how I've been feeling.

She smiles. "Besides, you've gotten Sexiest Man Alive from two magazines and a television network. If I was the jealous type my head would have exploded by now. So, no. I'm not worried."

"Unless you think I should be," she adds quietly. Her gaze is unwavering, but it's there, in the tightness of her jaw, in her hands clasped too tightly in her lap.

I smile, running my thumb along her cheekbone, and shake my head. If there's anything left that I'm sure about, it's Sophie. My dick is a little less discriminating, apparently, but I'm not sure that can be helped.

She turns her head and kisses the base of my palm. When she continues, her confidence is firmly back in place.

"So the only real problem is that you don't want to hit a woman."

Something about her voice annoys me. "I don't know why you and Josh say that like it is so obvious. I mean, if you all knew it was going to be a problem, would it have been so hard to tell me before I went to the audition?"

"I didn't think you'd take it so personally," Sophie says. "I mean, come on, you're nobody's idea of a sadist. Well, except for Cambodia last year, when you punched that guy," she teases.

"He was trying to sell me a _child_," I hiss. It's gonna take a good five years before I can joke about that.

"Way to prove my point," she says.

"And I didn't punch him. I beat him bloody. Which, I might add, is not the best argument for my nonviolent nature."

"Sure thing," she says. "Anyway, you don't have to be a sadist for the part. Most of the movie is pretty light BDSM, nothing abusive, and it is supposed to be feigned." She sighs, stroking my knee absently. "But I guess we've both been in the business long enough to know how real it can feel. So the question is, do you still want to do it?"

"That's_ not_ the question. I can't quit in the middle of the project, or it will wreck the entire budget. They'll have to recast, and a lot of people that were counting on work will be left out while they re-organize the whole thing. Not to mention that if I bail out of the biggest movie of my career because I can't separate a role from reality…" I give her a look.

I might as well get a neck tat that says _I can't act, _and she knows it. Before she came home, I was starting to think the real question might involve men in white coats and medication, but she makes it all sound so much simpler than it's been feeling.

"No. Screw it," Sophie says adamantly. "It's_ not_ okay. If it makes you feel like this, even if the movie comes out brilliantly, you should walk away."

I give her a pained look.

She folds her arms. "Would you let me do it? If I was filming _Fifty Shades_ and it was making me feel like this?"

My throat twists and I think for a second I'm going to get another one of those weird gagging/coughing fits. I swallow hard against it and glare at Sophie.

"God no. I'd kidnap you to Mexico first. But it's not the same, because you're a woman. Julia's role in this movie is the hard one, not mine. She's the one that's naked and tied spreadeagle in front of the whole crew several times a day. I would never tell you to do a nude scene if it made you uncomfortable. But I'm a guy. It's different."

"That's bullshit," she says angrily. "It's the same. If you don't want to do this, then you should quit. There is no way the producers on _Queen of Hearts_ would ever fire you. You _are_ that show. It isn't like your career would be over, so don't think like that. All we have to do is tell people the truth. You don't like to hit women, and you couldn't stomach it even for the movie. Your fans will love it. I'll call your publicist right now," she offers.

"That would be like begging to be typecast for the rest of my career. You don't just throw away opportunities to expand your range."

"Okay, so blame it on me. I'll even do all the interviews, tell everybody that I couldn't stand you doing scenes so intimate with another woman. That way all your 'no comments' will come off looking like you are trying to protect me."

"You would never ask me to give up a role."

"The fans don't know that. Come on, Dave. You can have a couple months off, and then go back to playing Alex Harper, getting into fistfights and whatever hot guest star the producers can come up with. Getting every fourteen-year-old with a crush on you to give their allowance to rescue child prostitutes. Being _happy._" Her eyes are pleading.

It's amazing. She obviously can't imagine why I'm having this reaction, but she's still willing to throw herself on the publicity grenade to save me from my own neurosis.

My stomach is still in knots, but I can't help but smile. "You're kind of incredible. You know that, don't you?"

"What I am is a terrible girlfriend. I should have known something was bothering you. You've been acting weird all month, and I've just been too busy to think about it."

I pull her into my lap, which is where I've wanted her this whole time. "Don't try to make this your fault. You're the only thing that's made me feel good since I started filming."

She cuddles into me, her head tucked into the curve of my neck.

I sigh. "I just need to find a way to make this work. It's stupid, Sophie. I know it's not real. I know it's not abuse. But every time I raise my hand to her, it feels like my head is going to explode. That's not logical at all."

"Maybe you're just going about it wrong. Have you talked to her about it?"

"She tried, today."

Sophie winces. I can feel her face scrunch against my neck. "Yeah, I can just guess how that went."

"Yeah, you can."

She sits back. "Look, if I had gotten the part of Ana, how would you want my co-star to handle things with me?"

Anger flashes through me, heating my skin. "Why do you keep turning this around?"

"Because you take better care of me than you do of yourself," she says flatly. "Answer the question."

I close my eyes, because the thought of her playing Ana makes me want to kill people and I don't particularly want her to think about that. Sophie chooses her own roles and I choose mine. That's the way we like it.

"I would want him to be checking in with you about every five seconds to make sure you were comfortable and that everyone was treating you with respect," I say finally. "And no, I haven't been doing as well as I should with that, with Julia. I mean, I ask, but I can't tell if she's being honest with me or not."

"She hasn't been doing it for _you_. That was my point." Sophie sits up, looking unhappy. "It's up to you, David. But don't just try to push through. Do it in a way that doesn't hurt you or don't do it at all."

I scrub a hand through my hair, a luxury I don't get on set. "I just don't get it. When I read the book, I was really excited about this role. There must have been more to it than all these sex scenes, more than just him subjugating her."

I sigh. "I need to figure this out by tomorrow. I don't have any time to screw around with our shooting schedule. Julia knows something's up, and I know Lucy suspects. I'm going to stay up tonight, I think, and read the book again. Try to figure out why I wanted to do this in the first place."

"Okay," Sophie says easily, getting up. "I'll make coffee."

"No, you should get to bed. I'll make it."

"I'm staying up with you."

"You just filmed all day and I took up the half an hour of relaxing time you get with my drama. You have to film all day tomorrow. There's no way I'm letting you pull an all-nighter just to hold my hand," I protest.

"There's no way I'm letting you sit up alone reading that book when I know how much those scenes have been upsetting you," she argues. "I've let you go through all of this alone because I was busy. I still have my copy of the book. I'll read with you."

When I don't respond, she tips her head, her eyes beseeching me. "Let me do this one thing for you, David, please."

I shake my head, smiling despite myself. There's no talking her out of it. There never is, when she wants something. "What did I do to deserve you?"

"Don't get me started. There's not enough time before I have to go back to work again." She winks and disappears into the kitchen. Jackson gets up and looks after her, then drops his head onto my knee. I scratch his ears.

"Yeah, I've got nothing to complain about, do I?" I ask him.

* * *

_Author's Note: Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading and reviewing this story! I can't tell you how much it means to me, and I've loved hearing all the different takes on the story and characters. _


	11. Chapter 11

It's almost time to get up when I finish reading the riding crop scene. The one in the book is totally different from the way it reads in the script.

"Soph, do you think-," I stop when I see that the book is sprawled across her chest and chin and she's fast asleep.

I smile gently, because she'll be pissed when she realizes she fell asleep, but she still achieved her goal. I wasn't alone.

I know exactly what I've been missing about Christian and Ana's story.

I take Sophie's book, set it on the nightstand and brush a kiss across her forehead. I program her phone to wake her up in time for work and grab my car keys.

I don't bother with coffee. Suddenly, I have all the energy I need.

When I arrive on set at 3:45, there are a lot of people already there. Including Nicole, who's on the long to-do list that has been assembling itself in my mind the whole drive over.

"Do you have a second?"

She looks surprised. "Uh, yeah. Of course. What do you need?"

"Look, we've been really lax about this so far, but I'm not happy with that. I need somebody to show up with a robe or some kind of cover-up for Julia in between scenes, and in between takes when Lucy looks like she's going to talk for a while. And I mean _right_ there. She shouldn't have to walk stark naked past all the lighting people to get to her chair where she left her robe. That's absurd."

Nicole is nodding vigorously, but I keep going.

"I know you already take care of about 300 different things," I say apologetically. "But would you mind if it was you? Delegation is all fine and good, but I know _you'll _show up on time. Every time."

Nicole looks like she might swoon. Poor girl's probably barely scored a single thanks since she started on this project. People treat production assistants like hell.

I smile. "You're the best."

Next stop, Lucy.

By the time Julia comes on set at 4:30, I've overhauled half the movie- in my mind at least. Lucy's agreed to reshoot a few specific scenes, and we have a date to screen some of the raw footage for other scenes that I'm concerned about.

I catch Julia outside her dressing room.

"I'm sorry," I tell her.

"David, I told you, you have nothing to be sorry about," she says, and then she sees my face. "Wow. You look…better."

I wink. "You're not looking so bad yourself."

She opens the dressing room door and waves me inside. "How are you feeling? What happened?"

"Sophie happened. My girlfriend," I explain, trying to suppress a smile that isn't quite dignified. "She's a little bit magic."

Julia sets down her coffee mug, then her keys. Finally, she turns back and gives me a quiet smile. "I hope you're good to her, then."

"I'm working on it," I say, thinking of the delivery she should be getting in about an hour.

Lillies, because she thinks roses are cliché. And white roses anyway, because my mom worked in a greenhouse, so I'm possibly the only straight guy in America that knows that white roses symbolize friendship. And a venti white chocolate macchiato, which Sophie enjoys with an enthusiasm usually reserved for hard drugs. She drinks them about once a year, because she claims they contain a number of calories equivalent to eating an entire water buffalo.

"I'm sorry for screwing up this movie," I tell Julia. "You've been knocking it out of the park playing Ana, and I've been doing nothing but holding you back."

She opens her mouth to protest but I raise a hand to stop her.

"No, it's okay. It was my problem. I've been approaching all these whips and chains scenes the wrong way, like it was something I was doing _to_ you, when we should have been doing it together."

She closes her mouth and tilts her head at me.

"It's not an attack-," I start.

"It's a dance," she finishes, and I can't help but nod.

"The belt scene is the only one where they fall out of synch," I shake my head. "I didn't get that before. It's awful, yeah. It is supposed to be awful because that is the one where he's really subjugating her, showing the darkest parts of him."

"So what do you want me to do?" Julia asks.

"I want you to have a safeword," I tell her. "BDSM is done in scenes, just like in a movie, and people have safewords so they can yell and cry and beg as much as they want, but they both know as long as the safeword isn't used, they are both actually happy with how things are going."

She nods. "Sure."

I step closer and grip her shoulders. "But you have to _use_ it, Julia. If I think you're just gritting your teeth for the sake of the performance, I'm not going to be okay with doing this movie. I have to be able to trust that you'll be honest with me about where you're at."

She reaches up and squeezes my hand. "One condition."

"Fair enough," I say, dropping my hands and leaning back against her dressing table.

"You have to have one, too. If a scene is getting to you, or you aren't sure if I'm really in pain, or you're uncomfortable for any reason, you have to call the cut." When I hesitate, she presses. "Promise me."

I smile a tight, rueful smile. "Have you been talking to Sophie?"

She crosses her arms.

"Lucy's going to shoot me if I stop every scene twenty times to check on you, and it's really going to screw up your flow once you're really into a scene," I point out. Not to mention that it will reveal me for the pussy I actually am to dozens of crew members who rightfully expect me to be able to maintain my professionalism.

Julia gives me a look that reminds me that she won a Grammy for playing an empress. Maybe she should be playing the Dom.

"It's not about me trusting you," she reminds me. "It's about trusting each other, and if we can't do that, you're right. We can't do this."

"Fine," I relent. "What's our word?"

Julia gives me a strange smile. My first acting coach made me study pages of labeled facial expression. I have an incredible vocabulary when it comes to visually expressed emotions, but I have no idea what this smile means, or who it belongs to.

"Cut," she says, with sadness weighing the word.

* * *

_Author's Note: Please leave me a note to let me know what worked or didn't work for you in this chapter. I was really torn in many places about how explicit to be about my character's feelings. Please let me know if you think I was too blunt, and likewise, if you were confused by anything, I'd be happy to answer questions. _


	12. Chapter 12

Julia is kneeling obediently before me, and today, the riding crop feels natural in my hand. It should. We've been practicing in my dressing room with Nicole chaperoning for over an hour.

It was Julia that suggested we do this scene "for real." Christian isn't supposed to be using the whip hard enough to hurt, she argued, so I shouldn't have to fake the swings, and then it would come out better on camera. She made me practice exactly how hard I could hit her without the crop stinging her flesh, and now as I slap it against my thigh, it swings lightly and easily.

I extend a hand to Julia and help her to her feet, flexing my bicep hard to make the most of both the gentlemanly and dominant aspects of the move.

She's focused entirely on me as I lead her over to where the manacles dangle from the ceiling. I stop and slap her hand with the whip.

"Did that hurt?"

We've done most of this scene already but I screwed it up with my coughing fit. Today, it already feels different. We're totally wrapped up in each other and I keep having to remind myself of the correct blocking positions for the scene.

Julia's eyes keep catching me, deep with longing and desire spiked with fear. They make it easy to forget the audience.

I take her wrist to raise it to the cuff, and she resists. Our eyes lock and a snippet of Lucy's speech about this moment replays in my head.

_Love is always a risk. The power of Ana's character is that she knows that the only way to face that risk and win is to surrender entirely to it. _

Her muscles relax and she lets me pull her arm high over her head, securing it with a wide leather cuff. She watches me the whole time, submitting completely to me spreading her legs and locking them apart with cuffs. When I'm done, she stands spread-eagled in a pair of tiny black panties and from the look on her face, you'd think we were alone.

I reclaim the riding crop and her breath catches audibly at the sight. My eyes flash with excitement. I trail it over her skin.

I give her my best smoldering look. MTV gave me an award for this look, which is fucking stupid. An award for a particular expression? Seriously? But right now I'm happy to use it to stall.

My gaze scorches from her toes up her legs. I don't really register any of her lovely body because panic is fluttering in the back of my throat again. I'm supposed to use the riding crop on her breasts to start.

I lock eyes with Julia. Beneath everything that belongs to Ana, I recognize her and my throat relaxes. Our chemistry sizzles, but there is safety there too. This moment doesn't have a thing to do with Christian and Ana. I wonder if the camera will know the difference.

"There are many kinds of sensations you can evoke with a whip," I tell her. "Most of them aren't pain."

I flick it lightly at the underside of her breast and she gasps. I smile wickedly to cover my relief.

This time, it doesn't feel ominous or cruel. It feels sexual, but for once I'm not aroused.

I brush the crop down the curve of her waist, and slap it lightly against the side of her thigh. I glide around behind her and angle my shoulders so that it will appear that I'm very close, while still leaving room for the camera to zoom in on the next shot.

With the knuckles of my free hand, I trace the graceful curve of her spine and Julia makes a breathy little sound that I guarantee just made half the men in the room hard.

Fortunately, that is not as many as usual because I forced Lucy to dismiss everyone from set who wasn't absolutely essential to the scene.

I move her braid to the side and brush a kiss on the nape of her neck. It wasn't in the blocking, but I think it will play well. She tilts her head back, and her cheek grazes my temple. It's a perfect opportunity to juxtaposition Christian's hatred of being touched with Ana's affectionate nature. I flinch away.

Lucy's going to give me a raise.

I bring the crop up so that it contacts the back of Julia's thigh. She jolts, but it looks like more surprise than pain. Christian is supposed to be whipping Ana's pussy, but I absolutely refuse to touch even Julia's ass with this crop. That didn't make her or Lucy particularly pleased, because it is going to be pretty hard to sell it to the camera when I am only touching her thighs and stomach, but come on. There are things people shouldn't have to do for a job, willing or not.

I drag the crop across her skin as I stalk around her, the camera following me like a trained dog.

When our eyes meet this time, hers are hazed with pleasure and I don't release her gaze as I strike precisely across her lower belly. She catches her breath and her head falls back. Her whole body stiffens and I try to make my eyes glow with excitement instead of envy at her acting.

She is amazing at faking orgasms. She doesn't oversell it, somehow makes it subtle but totally unmistakable. If she had a boyfriend, he'd have an anxiety disorder for sure after watching this scene. I mean, you could never be sure if she was really enjoying herself or not. What a mood killer that would be.

The climax of the love story is up next, in the moment after her orgasm. I draw the whip from her belly button to her throat, tipping her chin up and then dropping the whip and taking her face in both hands as I kiss her wildly.

"Cut!" Lucy yells.

What the fuck? That was incredible. She should be worshipping the two of us right now.

"David, you're doing an amazing job, but Julia, I need a little more from you. This scene is absolutely pivotal," Lucy strikes her fist into her palm.

Nicole sneaks in between us and drapes Julia with some giant, billowy piece of fabric. Julia looks surprised and I smile at Nicole, who blushes and backs off to stand awkwardly a couple steps away.

"The whole point is that you aren't held back by being tied. This is the only time Christian feels safe enough to express the depth of his feeling, because Ana is tied and helpless. But we want you to convey that Ana is in no way held back by being tied. She's absolutely free, and her love for him is so powerful in that submission." Lucy is pacing. "If we can't pull that off, we might as well bag the whole film, because without that emotion, this is just a porno."

I quirk an eyebrow at Julia, who looks pissed.

"I'm tied hand and foot, and my face is kind of busy," she snaps. "Help me out here."

I stifle a laugh, because Julia is always so accommodating. Lucy really hit the hot button with that porno comment.

"We need to see that you don't need to touch him to love him," Lucy says, pacing faster.

"Screen kisses are all about hand placement," I protest. "Julia's right."

It's one of the little tricks that we use to make what happens on the silver screen seem so much more vivid than real life. There are only so many ways to push two mouths together, but on camera we can make a kiss worth a thousand scripts. It's all in the hands.

Lucy slaps her hands onto her hips. She's so furious that she's silent for a change.

"Okay," I say diplomatically. "What if when we do the pull-back-and-stare-into- each-other's-eyes thing you focus on Julia's face? She can do just a hint of a smile, with triumph and dawning joy. Maybe just a little bit shy."

"Jesus, David, I can't write a dissertation here," Julia protests.

"I've seen you write an encyclopedia with those eyes," I tease. "Don't tell me you can't."

"Well, I do try to avoid the King Kong style of acting," she says.

"Um, you try not to look like a hairy monkey?" I struggle to keep my eyes from dipping down from her face. "I think you're doing okay."

"No, have you seen the newest King Kong movie? Where that actress just stares with big blank eyes at the camera in _every take_?"

Julia widens her eyes, tilting her head and staring dumbly at me.

"What are you talking about? That's my whole career!" I joke, giving her the blank look right back, batting my eyelashes and she cracks up so hard that she swings a little from her manacles.

"Easy there," I chuckle, steadying her. "Bondage and laughing aren't meant to go together. Too easy to lose your balance."

Lucy's tapping her foot impatiently. "Are you two done?"

Julia stifles her laughter. "Yeah, I've got it Lucy. Just pan the camera back a little and I'll play all-powerful sub for you."

I hide a wince. Something tells me Julia isn't going to be eager to work for Lucy again after this.

We do three more takes, even though I feel like Julia nailed it in the first shot. I'm pretty sure Lucy's just being petty.

When Lucy finally calls the wrap, Julia grins at me and I feel a crazy rush of pride like I did on my very first one take wrap.

Nicole's coming forward to help Julia out of the manacles, but I kneel down and free her ankles. I'm half-hard from her bare breasts rubbing against my chest during that heavily posed stage kiss, so I'm careful not to brush her chest with mine when I unbuckle the cuffs around her wrists.

"Still got any circulation left in your hands?"

Julia rolls her shoulders stiffly and pulls on her robe. "Barely. I didn't realize how long I'd been up there."

"Here, let me," I tell her, placing my hands on her shoulders and squeezing the tight muscles there.

She winces. "Ooh, yeah. I _am_ sore."

I lighten up on the pressure and rub her shoulders until I feel the muscles loosen.

"Full-service co-star," Julia comments, and grins. "I like it. Thank you."

"Least I can do," I tell her, looking at my prop watch. I should have at least twenty minutes. I want to check my phone but I left it in my dressing room. I stride off set, blinking as I pass the light array to re-adjust my eyes.

"Hey, you," a familiar voice says.

I break into a grin and turn to see Sophie standing just behind the lighting personnel. I sweep her up and swing her around once, still riding the high of finally nailing a scene.

"Hey gorgeous." I kiss her, heedless of my stage makeup. When I set her back onto her feet, she's a little breathless.

"What are you doing here? I thought you had to work?" I ask, noticing about halfway through the sentence that she's in stage makeup and not wearing her own clothes.

"I wasn't needed for a three-scene block, so I begged off for an hour. I'm almost out of time, but I'm glad I caught you before I had to go again."

"How long have you been here?" Sophie's used to seeing me stage-kiss other women, but a mostly nude bondage scene might be enough to rattle even her supremely professional composure. Maybe I should have skipped the shoulder rub.

"For most of the takes, I think." She tilts her head, her eyes intent on my face. "It's intense. How are you doing?"

"Fine, actually. Did you get your present?"

Her concentration breaks on a lovely smile. "Yes. I'm way spun out on sugar right now. I can barely hold it together." She stands on her toes and kisses my cheek. "You're so sweet. I loved the flowers, too, although I had to text your mom to decode them for me."

"Great, you probably just won me a million points from her on that one. I'll be good on Mother's Day gifts for a couple of years."

Sophie smiles. "Yeah, she might have gotten a little teary."

"That's just because she's happy that you called her."

"Does she still ask you if you've gotten a ring on my finger yet?"

"Every. Single. Time." I roll my eyes. "I swear, if I ever do, I'm going to keep it a secret until she asks just so I can hear her reaction."

"I don't know, you might damage your hearing with that reaction," Sophie says dryly. "I'd reconsider if I were you."

"Aren't you going to introduce me?" Julia's voice asks from behind me. I step out of the way and she extends a hand with a smile. "You must be the infamous Sophie."

"My agent tells me infamous is to be avoided," Sophie says, making a face. "Which has really put a damper on my deep and abiding love of drinking and driving."

Julia laughs and they shake hands. "Maybe I should switch agents. Before I landed my HBO series, my agent actually suggested a drunken weekend including table dancing and maybe an 'accidental' nip slip. For cheap publicity, you know."

"Cheap being the operative word," Sophie deadpans.

"Ooh," I wince. "Tell me that story isn't true."

"Would that I could," Julia says sheepishly.

"Ew. I'd sic Sophie's publicist on him if I were you. She'd beat some ethics into that guy for sure."

"I don't know what you have against Barbara," Sophie protests. "She's sweet."

"She's sweet the way a mama bear is sweet. All soft and furry until you touch her cub, and then suddenly your number of fingers and toes aren't adding up anymore."

"That's what you should do for your next fundraiser," Julia suggests. "Cage matches between actor's support staff. There's a production assistant on my show that would leave some blood on the floor for sure."

Sophie laughs. "That's perfect. David, I think she's got something there."

"I don't know. My last interviewer seemed to think that supporting non-violent charities with violent fundraisers was some kind of faux pas."

"I watched that interview," Julia protested. "She was such a bitch. I think it just made you come off even sweeter, though."

"Your murderous production assistant would have come off sweet next to that shark. As soon as I walked into the interview and saw the shoes, I knew it was all over."

"Pointy toes?" Sophie asks.

"Sharp enough to puncture."

Sophie shudders in sympathy.

"Yeah, I'm thinking about catching something really contagious right before the publicity tour," I say with a sideways glance at Julia. "You look better on camera anyway."

She crosses her arms. "Chicken."

"Interviews always make me look like I'm on amphetamines," I complain.

"You should make them go jogging with you, like the President does," Sophie suggests. "You could get a sexy little sweat going, and work off enough energy that you wouldn't fidget. Win win."

"Yeah, except you've been running with me," I point out. "So you know that unless they send a cripple for an interviewer, whoever it is will smoke me and I'll look like a candy ass."

Julia cracks up and Sophie rolls her eyes at me. "So not true." She bumps me with her hip. "Hey, at least if you're jogging, you know they can't send you a pointy-toed interviewer."

"True enough."

Sophie squeezes my arm. "I've got to go. I'm due back in half an hour."

I frown. "So soon?" I sling an arm around her shoulder and pull her into my side, enjoying her warmth.

She hugs me quickly around the waist and then steps away with an apologetic smile. "They need me to make my overgrown frat boy of a co-star look loveable. I don't want to break it to them, but nobody is that good of an actress."

"I'm glad I got to meet you," Julia offers. "David's such a gentleman. You're very lucky."

Sophie smiles, but her nose doesn't wrinkle up like it does when it is a genuine smile. "I know."

"You be sure to take good care of him," Julia says, her accent more pronounced than usual.

Sophie meets her eyes squarely. "I could say the same to you."

There's a pause, and I shift my weight and slide my hands into my pockets. Sophie smiles again, her nose perfectly smooth. "I'll see you at the premiere."

Julia nods once. "Of course."

Sophie's eyes flick to mine and her head tilts in our cocktail-party signal for 'Are you okay?'

I nod and smile reassuringly and her eyes warm.

She checks her watch again and heads for the door.

"She seems very nice," Julia says. "I'm going to grab a quick snack before we start up again." She flashes her toothy smile at me. "I hate bondage on an empty stomach."

I nod and steal a look at Sophie's retreating form. She has a great ass. Would have been perfect for that spanking scene.

It isn't until Julia's gone that I realize she didn't head in the right direction for the Craft Services buffet.


	13. Chapter 13

I kick my feet up on the bland hotel coffee table, trying to get comfortable without scuffing my shiny dress shoes.

"Should I bring a flask for the red carpet?" Sophie calls from the bathroom.

"Hell yes, but I'm going to have to carry it for you, and I'm not making any promises about saving you any."

I hear her coming down the hall and toss my magazine onto the table.

"Maybe we should bring two," I suggest, then turn and catch sight of her. I give her a low whistle. "How do you _do _that?"

We have to get dressed up frequently for events and as little love as I have for a tux, it's worth it, because evening gowns fit Sophie like they were invented just for her.

Sophie tugs matter-of-factly at her bodice. "Save the charm for the cameras, hot stuff."

I raise an eyebrow at her. "And you say I can't take a compliment."

She bends down to dig through her carry-on bag. "It's the ballet training. Evening wear is all about posture."

"It's not the ballet. It's the _you_," I say firmly. "You should have saved that dress for your own premiere, though. This is supposed to be Julia's night."

Sophie's wearing a silver corset-topped gown with a ribbon of gold snaking through the fabric in seemingly random loops that managed to accentuate every one of her lovely curves.

Sophie grabs a small satin clutch and shoves a pile of toiletries back into her carry-on.

"It won't hurt to look good in those ménage a trois pictures you know they're going to want of the three of us."

"Jealous?" I tease. "I happen to like pictures of me surrounded by beautiful women." I bat my eyelashes at her. "It sets off my eyes."

She starts transferring things into her evening purse without answering.

I frown "Soph? You okay?"

She turns and smiles at me, looking a little tired. "I'm fine. It just annoys me how the press has to look for drama in _everything._"

I step close and slide my fingers up the silky skin of her neck. Her hair is pinned up into an artfully effortless cascade of curls the color of dark chocolate. I want to bury my hands in her hair and mess it all up, pull her astride my lap and make her forget all about premieres and photographers.

"My makeup," she protests, and I kiss her anyway. She is stiff for a second, but then her lips soften under mine and her hand comes up to grip the back of my neck with surprising strength.

My tongue steals into her mouth and it isn't until my fingers catch on a hairpin that I realize I'm mussing her hair after all, and probably making us late.

I pull back reluctantly. "Shit, I'm sorry. I'll fix it."

She smooths her hands down my lapels. "It doesn't matter."

I cup the nape of her neck and rub the sleek muscles there, tipping her forehead against my chin because she can't lay her head on my shoulder without ruining my dark jacket with her makeup.

I love the rare times when we're off for a few days or weeks between projects and neither of us has to think about costumes or makeup or how to stand so people can see all the parts of us in just the right light.

We're deep into shooting the new season of our show, and while it is nice to have Sophie on set with me again, we're both exhausted from the schedule. I don't know how people never do the math to figure out how many more hours of filming is required for a television show vs. a feature film.

Movie actors work for six weeks to three months at a time on a movie and everybody but the top stars has time off in between. Television actors are on for months at a time, and usually scrambling for film projects in their off time. But it is a steady paycheck, and reliable exposure. Add hot girls, fight scenes and the fact that I never have to cook for myself anymore, and I am so in.

I do love my job, way more than anybody has a right to. I just wish it came with eight hours of sleep.

I sigh. "Thanks for flying out here with me. I know you'd rather have had a couple days of actual free time. There's no way I could miss this, though, even if we hadn't turned it into a fundraiser."

She makes a little groaning sound. "You're a very persuasive man. For a neck rub like this, I'd fly to Egypt."

Despite what she says, her muscles aren't relaxing under my fingers the way they usually do. I abandon the massage and tip her chin up, searching her eyes.

"Soph."

She tries to pull away. "We're late, aren't we? Just give me one second to redo my lipstick."

I catch her around the waist before she can escape. "Sophie Rybak, are you jealous? Is that what this is about?"

This is serious but I'm fighting hard against a smile. "You? Jealous? Of me?" I ask incredulously, losing my battle against the smile.

She meets my eyes for one second and flushes.

I start to laugh. She smacks me with her purse.

"I'm sorry," I gasp.

"You should be. You're a total jerk," she fumes, shoving at my chest. I squeeze her tighter, still laughing.

"No, it's really cute. Come on, tell me again what you're worried about? Those ménage a trois pictures?" I leer.

I have to let her go because the look on her face tells me I'm seconds from having that tiny little purse crammed down my throat.

"Do you not remember all the ménage a trois pictures with you and me and Josh?"

"Yeah, but its _Josh,_" she scoffs.

"Have you totally forgotten season one?" I ask rhetorically and she gives me a sideways glance.

It's pretty rare that either of us acknowledges the massive crush Josh had on her in season one, back when she and I were still flirting like crazy in between takes and lying to the media and everyone else about being interested in each other.

She goes to run her fingers through her hair and stops herself, sighing.

"You're right, David. I'm tired, and I'm being petty and you should really just ignore me. I would love it if the premiere were tomorrow morning at about 10 and I could go on a good night's sleep. That's all that is really bothering me."

I turn her away from me and gently detangle the hairpin that I knocked askew. "What's bothering me," I tell her quietly, "is that you're upset, even though you know perfectly well how crazy I am for you."

I smooth the loose curl and pin it back into place, pressing a kiss to the nape of her neck.

I think about the ring that I'm having designed for her. I had been planning on keeping it until I was sure that she was ready, but I know if I had it right now I'd spoil the whole surprise.

"There's not a woman or a movie or anything else on this earth that could change that," I tell her in a low voice. "The only life I'm interested in having is the one with you in it."

She turns to me with a little strangled sound and presses her face hard into my neck, hanging onto me for all she's worth, and I hang on right back.

We are still mostly on time, even though Sophie had to redo most of her makeup and talk me out of taking her straight back to bed. I swear to God, if this wasn't an event for my charity, I'd ditch the whole premiere idea, even if I am the damn star.

I love my job, I love my life, and I love that it gives me the opportunity to do things for people around the world that I'd otherwise be powerless to help.

I know it is selfish and immature of me, but I really just want to stay home with my girlfriend tonight. I want to see how many times I can get her to scream my name. I want to eat cookies in bed, and scratch my balls without worrying that somebody will catch it on film. I should care more about saving kids from prostitution. I _do_ care about it, or I wouldn't be in a fucking limo with my pants still buttoned, but I don't much _feel _like I care at the moment.

I haven't let go of Sophie's hand since we got into the car, and she's sitting closer than she usually does, crushing the full skirt of her gown between us.

"Why don't you stick with me tonight?" I propose. "We'll do the interviews together. You know all the magazines pay more for pictures with both of us in them anyway, so the photographers will be happy. Besides, we have a good interview routine worked out. Why mess with what works?"

Sophie shakes her head. "No way," she says firmly. "There's not going to be enough of you to go around as it is. Let me play reporter pacifier and the red carpet will be less of a shouting match."

Somewhere along the drive the steel went back into her spine. I'm glad, but I don't know how much of that she's faking and I hate the idea of her having to negotiate the press when she's feeling vulnerable. I bring our intertwined fingers to my lips.

"Mario Kart in my sweats when we get home," Sophie vows.

"You're on, but I swear to God, woman, if you don't let me win at least once, we're going back to playing HALO instead."

That gets a smile out of her, and when her nose wrinkles up with genuine pleasure, I feel about ten feet tall.

Too soon, the limo pulls up at the start of the red carpet, and it's lit up like the Fourth of July out there, flashbulbs already popping even though we're not in sight yet.

"Really ugly, holey sweats," Sophie says.

"Not the ones with penguins on them?" I say, cringing.

"_So_ many penguins."

"With the damn hats?" I gripe. "Animals shouldn't wear hats. It's unnatural."

I have to open the door before she has a chance to respond. I step out with my classic smile in place, the one that matches my tuxedo. I turn with Christian's restrained grace and offer my hand to Sophie. It's not the easiest thing to get out of a low-slung car in heels and a big skirt, as she's reminded me more than once.

Before she gets one foot out of the car, the moment has been recorded for posterity about two thousand times, and I feel a flash of recklessness shoot through me. Once she gets both feet on the ground, I tug her hand a little too hard.

It pulls her to her feet but unbalances her so that she falls against my chest. I'm ready, though, both arms going around her waist so I can catch her, lift her, and kiss her, all in the same moment. It's a swing dancing move I learned from a movie I did when I was fifteen and it looks like magic on film.

Sophie stiffens with surprise, but when her feet come off the ground, her lips curve in a smile against mine and she wraps her arms around my neck, matching my kiss and raising the ante by about 20 degrees. When I finally set her back down, I pull back just a little and she smiles up at me and wipes the smudges of lipstick off my face.

"Somebody got over their phobia of PDA," she murmurs.

"Baby, I've got moves you've never seen," I leer, and she laughs.

We turn and face the cameras, hand in hand, and Sophie's smile is real now, and absolutely radiant.

We pose together for pictures for several minutes, sacrificing our vision to the flashbulbs. Then some attendants usher us out of arrivals and into the media gauntlet section of the red carpet. Since it is the premiere of my movie, and a fundraiser that I organized, every single reporter here is fighting for their five minutes with me.

Fortunately, the season premiere of _Queen of Hearts _aired last week, so Sophie is nearly as hot a commodity as I am. She's immediately swept into interviews, and I doubt she'll have to stand around waiting for me to finish.

I answer a few rounds of the same stock questions rephrased in various ways, and when somebody asks me something new, I blink and fumble for a second.

"What was the hardest part of filming _Fifty Shades of Grey?_"

"The hardest part?" I say, stalling. I check the reporter's shoes surreptitiously. Round toed, high heeled boots. I can work with that.

"You know, I'm going to be honest with you. This role took a lot out of me, and I don't think I would have done a particularly great job without Sophie."

The reporter raises perfectly waxed eyebrows, eagerness lurking behind her friendly façade. I very rarely discuss Sophie in interviews at all, and never in a very personal way. "Sophie Rybak was an early pick to play Ana, but she didn't end up taking part in the production, did she?"

"Not officially, no. But this is a unique movie."

"It is," the reporter agrees, and she looks like she's actually listening to me instead of planning her next question.

"I wasn't very acquainted with the BDSM subculture before taking on the part of Christian Grey. I thought it was just for people that liked it a little rough, you know?" I wink and give her a flirty smile and she laughs and plays along.

"But this experience taught me that the beauty of BDSM is the trust you have in another person to know you and push you in exactly the way you need to be pushed to break through your previous limits into something you had no idea you could be. That's what Sophie does for me."

"She busted out the whips and chains on you, did she?" the reporter asks with a wicked grin.

I laugh. "Just verbally, fortunately for me. But she really helped me change my perspective about how Christian and Ana should be portrayed. The result is that Fifty Shades is something absolutely transcendent of the romantic genre. It's something completely new."

"That's a pretty big statement," the reporter says skeptically.

"I don't make it lightly," I confirm, holding her gaze. I've been in the entertainment industry a long time, probably longer than this girl, and I know how much recycling there is of material. This quote is going to get repeated a lot.

The reporter turns back to the camera. "Wow, so you have it from the horses' mouth. This is going to be huge. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me tonight, David. Do you have a message for your guardian angel of BDSM, Sophie Rybak?"

I laugh. "She'll love that title. No, she knows exactly what I think." I turn to the camera and smile mysteriously, thinking about ring I designed that will be back from the jewelers in less than a week. "Mostly."

"Whew!" the reporter exclaims. "Girls, I think we can all hope that Sophie was sitting down with a glass of ice water for that smile. What a tease. Thanks again, David."

I feel a hand on my arm and turn with a practiced smile to see Julia standing there, looking fragile and lovely in a classic mermaid-style gown the color of heavy cream.

"Hey, the leading lady in the flesh." I grin lecherously. "Though perhaps not so much flesh as usual."

She sticks out her tongue at me. "Figured I'd better go modest. This crowd is going to see plenty of me as it is."

That's all we have time to say before it is more interviews, more pictures, more of the same five questions.

We pose for pictures, my hand casually resting on her waistline. Her skin feels hot through the thin silk of her dress. I'm hyperaware of her all-too-familiar body so close to mine.

I deliberately relax my shoulders to hide my flash of irritation. The spark between us was useful for filming, but it would be nice if we could switch it off now that the scenes are in the can.

I'm thankful for the aides that come to retrieve us when it is time to head inside, because there is no way to keep track of time in this throng of strangers with cameras and microphones. I'm looking around for Sophie when Julia grabs my hand.

"Hey, let's steal a minute before we head backstage. I want you to meet my date."

I follow willingly, curious. As far as I know, Julia's not dating anyone. She leads me out of the main crowd and at first I don't see anybody. Then my gaze drops and I see a woman sitting in a wheelchair, smiling politely at me. The resemblance is unmistakable. She has Julia's dark hair and sea-green eyes, set in a face that is more plain and less refined than her daughter's.

I feel a pang of guilt. I've never thought to invite my own mom to a premiere. Never considered that she'd want to be a part of this circus. We just got the news last week that her lump was benign, and this would have been the perfect way to celebrate.

"David, meet my mum, Caroline."

"It's very nice to finally meet you, David. Julia's been singing your praises since you two started filming together."

Events like these are like sprinting through a social obstacle course- you only have an instant to see what the person expects you to be and figure out how to give it to them. Julia's mother's eyes hold a hint of challenge, and I swallow the pleasantries that were on the tip of my tongue.

"You flew all the way across the pond to be here? Must have been a pain in the ass to get through all the airport security with a wheelchair."

Caroline's polite face disappears as she bursts out laughing. I smile, glad that risk panned out.

"You're damn right it was," she says when she recovers her breath. She beams up at me. "But I couldn't wait another minute to see the final product of all Julia's hard work."

Belatedly, it hits me that this is Julia's _mom _and my impeccable visual memory starts playing a high-speed reel of all the debauched things she is about to see me doing to her daughter.

Now it is Julia's turn to laugh. "Oh my God, David, your _face!_ Mum, I forgot to tell you, David here is a fantastic actor, but he's a bit of a prude. He thinks that I told you this movie was produced by Disney."

I finally spot Sophie through the crowd. I give Julia a dirty look. "You're a bad person. You know that, don't you?"

Caroline laughs and I give her my most charming smile. "So nice to meet you, ma'am. Your daughter is an incredibly talented young woman. Her manners aside, you should be very proud."

I excuse myself and snake my way through the crowd until I can slip an arm around the familiar curve of Sophie's waist. She's hugging her arms tightly across her chest in a way that tells me she's sorry she chose the strapless dress.

"Are you freezing yet?" I whisper in her ear and she excuses herself from her conversation and leads me away gratefully.

"I shouldn't be. This room is crammed with people."

I undo the button of my tuxedo jacket. "That sounds like a yes."

She stops me with a hand on my arm. "No, David, you're about to give your speech. You need to be wearing your jacket for that."

"It's a fundraiser speech. Nobody will care what I wear or say," I protest. "They just clap politely, I'll make the requisite two lame jokes and we call it a night and watch some bondage."

An aide approached. "I'm sorry to interrupt, sir, but you're needed backstage."

"Yup, no problem," I tell him. I glance back at Sophie and she squeezes my hand. "Go ahead. I'll see you in a few minutes."

I press a kiss to her cheek and reluctantly let her go.

The aide leads me to a small room backstage where Julia's already waiting.

"Can I ask you to do me a favor?" I ask him.

"Of course, Mr. Tate. What can I do for you?"

I shrug out of my jacket and hand it to him. "Would you mind bringing this to my girlfriend? She's the one in the silver dress."

He looks amused. "I know who she is, sir."

"Oh, right. Thank you."

He nods and exits with my jacket.

Julia smiles a quick greeting to me and does something on her phone.

I feel a little involuntary tingle of excitement at her presence. There were moments, when she'd make me laugh between takes or when it seemed like her arousal was just a little too real during a scene, that I'd wonder if we could have had something. I had fantasized a few times about asking her. Not asking her out, but just…if the scenes were so real for another reason, maybe.

She's digging through her purse for something, but frankly, her purse isn't big enough that the contents could have occupied her for this long. She doesn't look up, though she must feel my eyes on her.

I thought we'd gotten to know each other pretty well during filming, but I had no idea her mother was in a wheelchair. In the end, what did I really know about Julia, other than that she was funny and hot? I didn't know her heart, the way I knew Sophie's. The way Sophie knew mine.

I watch Julia, delicately lovely in that cream colored gown. I don't need to ask her anything.

"I wanted to thank you," I tell her. "I was going to quit the movie. I couldn't have faked my way through that without you."

She really looks at me for the first time since I entered the room, but this time, her expressive eyes are more brick wall than encyclopedia.

Her smile is gentle, though, when she says, "It wasn't fake. We may have been telling a story, but it was a real experience that we shared."

She pauses, as if she might go on, but then presses her lips together and looks back down at her purse.

The aide pokes his head back inside. "You guys are on. Are you ready?"

I nod, and steal one last glance at Julia before I leave the room.

We walk on stage together and we smile and wave until the applause dies down. Julia steps up and adjusts the microphone so that it is low enough to catch her voice. She bends and murmurs casually into it.

"I know you lot are just here for the free champagne." There is general laughter and she smiles knowingly. "But we have to do our bit for humanity first, right?"

She points out at the crowd with a tilt of her hip that is menacing and cute all at once. "So you all give your money to whoever David wants you to and then we can all sit back and enjoy the show and the drinks, hmmm?"

The laughter is louder and less polite this time. "Without further ado," she says, raising her arms and dropping the teasing tone, "my incredibly talented and philanthropically minded co-star, David Tate!"

I step up and smile until the applause slows, and then borrow Julia's informal tone. "I apologize for that. She's still recovering from playing my submissive, and I'm afraid it's made her a touch bossy."

I wait until I feel the crowd settle.

"The studio has graciously allowed all the proceeds from tonight to go to a fund that will help rescue, house and provide vocational training for former child prostitutes in Southeast Asia. So, I'll just leave the lights on until I hear the scratching of pens on checkbooks," I deadpan. "I have a number in mind," I tease over the sound of laughter. "And nobody's getting any whips and chains until we get there."

I pause. "No. Seriously, though. We're all here to watch a movie about a man who has suffered terrible abuse and who finds a woman whose trust and love heals him." I scan the audience, not that I can see a thing past the lights. Still, I focus my eyes so they'll think I am looking at them.

"Most of you won't ever meet the people we help tonight, but please know that you've made a huge difference, nonetheless. I've been over there, touring the shelters and schools that we're donating to. I've met the people you're helping and I was overwhelmed by their suffering and by my inability to provide the love and acceptance they needed to right the wrongs done to them."

My throat tightens against the memory of their faces. When I went through the shelter, the kids shied away from me. Some of the girls flirted with me, or tried to touch me. Girls too young to walk to the mall alone in this country.

I don't try to hide the tears that sting my eyes.

I grew up hunting and fishing in the swamps of the deep south and part of me still cringes at the idea that anyone would see me weak, see me cry or hear my voice break. But the actor in me knows that this is the way to squeeze every last penny out of the many rich donors listening to this speech.

God knows the kids I'm trying to help have done worse things for money. So I don't hide what I feel from the audience, but I try to temper the guilt trip with a little reality.

"We can't do that from here. We can't love them, or care for them, or teach them the job skills they desperately need. What we can do is give them money and security and a chance at another life."

My voice comes out rougher than I intended it to and my usually rock solid rote memorization abruptly fails me. I can't remember how I'd planned to manipulate them. The lights are angled wrong and I can't see anyone in the crowd to judge their reaction, to see if I need to lighten or darken my speech for the best impact. I'm just winging it.

"A lot of the people here tonight make movies for a living, like I do. We take a piece of real life and make it sharper, more vivid. Make it truer than true even though it isn't real."

I swallow. "That fiction is not nothing. It brings people joy and pain, discomfort and peace. It creates opportunity. It becomes its own kind of reality."

I pause. I still can't remember my damn speech, and my throat is tight.

I want like hell to say the right thing so I can put a roof over the head of those kids who couldn't even look me in the eye after what they'd had to do to feed themselves but my ability to bullshit has deserted me at the worst possible time.

I look for a familiar pair of melted chocolate eyes, but up on the stage, I'm blinded and strangely alone under the scrutiny of the crowd.

I know Julia's behind me, but this is my show and I can hardly fall back on her when I know she doesn't have a speech prepared either.

My voice drops, but the microphone pushes it out into the ears of every person in this giant room nonetheless.

"But for all of us who make fiction for a living, I want to remind you of something very important. That no matter how many fans you have, no matter how many people you impress or the compromises you've made to make more money, to achieve success, there will come a moment." I pause.

This is probably not the right thing to say. It is true for me, but it may not be the kind of true that is going to write checks. I say it anyway.

"There will come a moment when you are all alone and all the other realities have fallen away. What is left in that moment is you."

I pause and look out. I can't see anyone, but it doesn't matter. They can see themselves.

"The question is, what do you want that to be?"

Applause explodes through the audience, and I hope to hell its bleeding heart, check-writing applause and not public-guilt-trip only applause, because I just ripped myself open for them and it better have fucking worked.

I step back from the podium and smile. Not for the camera this time. Just for me.

* * *

_Author's Note: Thank you so much to all of you who have supported this story, and let me take it to all the dark and confusing places that I did, and appreciated what I was trying to say. I can't tell you how much all of your support has meant to me, and every favorite and follow and especially all of your kind reviews. You guys are the best!_

_If you'd like more of my writing, check out my new book or my other fanfiction at my website: __ michellehazenbooks__ dot com _

_If you watch the Vampire Diaries show, I have lots of fanfiction in that fandom, and a current story going that is a crazy mix of action, romance, smut and friendship so check my page for that!_


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